Bentley wins Santa Clara Spring
View full results for Santa Clara Spring 2009-2010
The Santa Clara Philalethic Invitational ended at 1AM with a final round featuring Kate Epstein and Robert Van Unen from Los Gatos and Annie McKenna and Logan Brog from Bentley. On a 2-1 decision, Annie and Logan defeated Kate and Robert for the tournament title. For Logan, this was the fifth tournament championship in his career – and counting. No one else has won more than three high school parli tournaments. The victory also pushes Annie/Logan to #1 on POI Rankings. Bentley is coached by Bruce Jordan, Los Gatos is coached by Sharon Smith. Wonchan Yi of Leland captured the Top Speaker award.
67 Comments to Bentley wins Santa Clara Spring
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“Congrats to Sarthak for a nice end to his career and to Robert for finally getting a trophy – after 10 tourneys of being one ballot short of getting screwed on speaks.”
-Congrats to Lynbrook AY as well on their first break! Unfortunately, the “trophy” you speak of is just a pretty normal medal…which I believe was given to all speech finalists and all debate elim participants with no differentiations between the events or placements. I concur with Robert Van Unen, that SCU has really become a money-making scheme. According to Robert, Los Gatos couldn’t bring judges so they paid the hired judge fee, but supposedly SCU didn’t hire ANY judges. I don’t know if it’s true that SCU really didn’t hire anyone, but if so, that’s just despicable. I’m sorry, but they should not be pulling in random college students into quarterfinals to judge their FIRST EVER DEBATE if they didn’t even do debate in high school – no offense to Robert/Kate of course, you guys are awesome people and amazing debaters and that was a great round nonetheless.
Also, a huge thank you to the Notre Dame coach (sorry, I don’t know this woman’s name), who had to sit through 3 different prep periods in octas, and, in addition to Ms. Brasher in quarters, were the only two judges we had throughout the entire tournament who truly flowed the entire debate and made a positive effort to make a fair decision. Very much appreciated!
Finally, I really have no words for what happened from the perspective of tab in octos (and even in quarters to an extent). Perhaps it was just in our quarters round, but the resolutions we were given said “FINALS PARLI” – Robert/Kate and Indranil/I debate “TH prefers the free market”, but if these truly were the resolutions for the final round instead, then Los Gatos perhaps had a slight advantage heading into the final round knowing the topics, but I guess this was not necessarily the case. However, when I talked to the other Lynbrook teams in quarters, it seemed like they had a completely different set of resolutions for quarters, so I’m really dumbfounded by how that could have occurred…
The octas situation was just even more frustrating however. Originally, they had listed 4 of the 6 Lynbrook teams at the bottom of the pairings saying that “Coach’s preference” essentially meaning that 2 of our teams would get walked over. So Lynbrook LL, BM, LK, and RY were originally on that list. All the octas rounds had already started their prep by 10 minutes or so, when a guy from tab comes by and says, wait these postings aren’t right. So we try to stop a couple of the rounds and put in the right Lynbrook team, and we basically repeated the process 3 times. Also, when we tried to determine who walked over who, we asked tab for our seeds. When looking at how people were seeded, tab noticed some other errors and recalculated the bracket once again. Finally, Lynbrook MB ended up debating Leland MG in octas with a completely new set of resolutions because MG had already had 1 hour of prep on the real resolutions. The other Lynbrook round was pushed back as well. Oddly enough, one of the resolutions in our octos round was “TH prefers the free market”. We debated that one, so yes, we debated the EXACT SAME resolution two outrounds in a row. To this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were still a ton of tabulation mistakes which screwed up the seeding even more. Effectively, we know for sure that Lynbrook AY was 5th seed, Lynbrook CR was 6th, Lynbrook BM was 8th, LL was 12th and RY was 11th – but when putting the bracket back together, we realized that some teams had to have debated other teams out of their normal seeding positions, and this is why some of the seeds on POI right now are missing. For instance, I heard that Notre Dame had a similar problem where a debater who was 3-1 at one point, was listed as 1-3 or so, and thus failed to clear according to the rankings. But the coach investigated and found the mistake – not all coaches do this so there were bound to be some other things that went wrong…
Anyway, congratulations to Los Gatos and Bentley once again – you guys are all great speakers and debaters and that must have been an epic final round. Looking forward to next year now…
Congrats Bentley!
It seems like the judging was below subpar at the tournament.
IDEA: Have each school only enter 4 teams, therefore every round is judged by a coach?
That assumes each school has one coach per event.
I’m the Notre Dame coach *waves*
And yeah, having worked something like 20 tournament judge panelings, there really isnt an easy answer to the judging problem. It’s better when you have cards of information to take into account years of experience etc, but it takes significantly longer to panel rounds by hand than have the computer do it for you (though I’m pretty good, I can panel fairly quickly) and they certainly weren’t taking online info into account.
I don’t know debaterresults, but its a fairly complex algorithm if you think about it-are there really any of the computer programs that can do more than just make sure a judge hasn’t seen a previous competitor? When we used computer assignments at CFL Parli/Pofo SQuals the computer seemed to have an underlying bias for certain school judges hitting certain schools that we couldn’t really distinguish easily…
I don’t know, it seems like making sure experienced judges were judging open rounds of their particular event (especially making sure in key rounds when power matching is in play that this is so), and no/less experienced is doing novice or are paneled is the way to go. For example, at SCU 1 I spent most of my time judging novice. Great, novice got someone who would give them good feedback, but shouldn’t I have been adjudicating Open?
This is long winded, sorry.
Other events have already solved this problem by 1) judge rankings such as strikes, community preference, mutual preference – yes, there’s tab software for that 2) requiring all judges to submit their philosophies online 3) good parent judge training programs 4) separating novice and open judge pools 5) TD handpicking judges for late elims.
I think another problem with judges was the issue of speaker points (which kept us from breaking). In one of my rounds the last place speaker got 26 (which is reasonable speaks) while in another round the highest speaker got 24 (and deserved around a 28 IMO). So depending on what type of judge you had, everyone would have gotten a different range of speaks.
^Do you happen to have the full packet of results?
Well yes, those are all excellent ways, but of course they require actually looking at information provided which of course was not done.
There really is no reason they couldn’t have at least attempted some sort of judge instructions. I know they gave them for I.E.s at Stanford and they were pretty detailed and clear and were complimented by a packet which explained norms for speaker points, rankings, rules for events, what to look for, etc. Judges were given nothing, so that complicates the situation when people bring totally green judges.
But, I mean, when we entered judges it asked for pool and level able to judge and that was definitely not taken into account. A strikes at the Open level would be nice, but it doesn’t look like many tournaments use strikes/mutual preference etc for Parli anyway.
No, sorry, I don’t personally have the packet. I can check if Leland received one though tomorrow.
Sorry, Leland apparently never received a packet.
Apparently we’re missing 2 pages of the packet, but of what I saw, the #1 seed was 5-0, and then teams 2 through 11 were all 4-1.
17th seed appeared to be Lynbrook YV(Ruicong Yan & Karthik Viswanthan), missing breaks by 1 point.
Do you know how much 18th seed missed breaks by? (Because that was me xP)
Im pretty sure mrs brasher got your packet. chillax brosef. Its just scu. Channel that disappointment into prepping for parli.
Hmmm. I have another question: How do the top teams “prepare” for parli? D othey write generic kritiks? Have they substancially researched the breadth vs depth, deontology vs utilitarianism, and read news everyday? I have no clue how to prepare.
You get a good night’s sleep and eat a good breakfast.
But seriously…to prep you should get a general structure to your cases down. That’s the biggest thing. Keeping it organized works wonders. Beyond that, just practice speaking into the mirror about a random issue.
HS parli doesn’t have any K-heavy teams yet, though that’s a pretty strategic way to prep.
Most teams default to util. Teams that run alternative philosophies typically use something fresher than Kant. I’ve been toying with an idea to run Kant or Rawls in a parli round, but I’ve never seen that done on either high school or college level.
In addition to what Ben said, rebuttal redos and other drills, reading the Economist, team-wide news overview sessions, issue briefs.
parli isn’t about the prepping before hand. Its not about living in the past. Its about being wholeheartedly in the moment, and living it. Truly thinking about every word uttered by your opponent and turning those words on themselves. Figure out how to be and you will know how to prep for parli.