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Dear Forensics Community,
We cordially invite you to the 48th Annual David Damus Trojan Championships. The tournament will be held Friday November 4 through Sunday November 6, 2011 on the University of Southern California campus and at our new partner school, Loyola High School.
We appreciate your continued support and know that there have been some challenges with the growing tournament. We made several changes this year in response to your feedback.
First, we have expanded to work with Loyola in order to help address our past problems with room capacity. We were disappointed last year to be unable to accept all entries and we have worked to address this challenge. Historically we were able to offer approximately 100 classrooms for competitor use. This year we have been able to increase to 150 rooms and Loyola’s help has been essential.
We are pleased to offer JV and Varsity divisions of both policy and Lincoln-Douglas debate. The varsity division of policy debate is a TOC qualifier at the quarter-final level and we are very proud that our LD Varsity division is now a semi-final qualifier.
At the conclusion of this year we will review both adding divisions (such as novice) and additional events. We feel that it is essential to assess the new tournament size before making those plans.
Second, in response to your feedback we are using the Joy of Tournaments website for all entries. Entries are now being accepted at http://www.joyoftournaments.com/ca/usc/. You can contact me directly at stables@usc.edu or at 213-915-8201 with any tournament questions.
Third, we are adding mutual preference judging in the varsity policy division. We will be carefully modeling successful MPJ practices from other tournaments in order to best preserve competitive and educational goals. We know a strong tab staff is essential to making this work and in addition to our great tab staff of for open policy Chuck Ballingall and Ted Belch we are also pleased to welcome Dan Lingel from Dallas Jesuit.
Even as we make some changes we continue to plan for the event as a high quality experience for you and your students. As a reflection on forensics budgets we are keeping our reduced entry fee structure that we adopted in 2009. We also promise a unique blend of fantastic awards for students.
We also just relaunched our website at www.usctrojandebate.com. We will also post announcements and updates at the site so we encourage you to check it out.
We hope to see you in Southern California in November!
Warmest regards,
Gordon Stables
USC Director of Debate & Forensics
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