Fishers Forensic Festival

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General information

This information is from a tournament in a past season!

This is a High School tournament in Indiana.

View manager contact information

Coaches--- The Fishers Speech and Debate Team would like to invite you to compete in our annual Fishers Forensics Festival! The tournament will take place on Saturday, January 9^th and will be run entirely online. We will use a combination of NSDA Campus and Zoom for all events unless the IHSFA announces a different format for the state series, in which case we will switch to use whatever program they are planning on using so that the students can develop more familiarity with it.

 We will run a full slate of IHSFA Speech and Debate events, with some modifications to accommodate the virtual format. Here are the specifics:

• This is our second time hosting a virtual tournament this year, and we learned a lot the last time out. One key take away is that if an online tournament starts to fall behind it becomes very difficult to get judges reorganized, especially on the debate side. That is why we built in a lot of time into the schedule.  
• Registration will close at 8 AM Wednesday, January 6th. You will be able to drop entries up through the start of the tournament 
• There will be no entry caps at this tournament, but we will not be offering a novice division.
• Speech will feature 3 preliminary rounds, a semifinal, and a final, regardless of the number of entries. We feel that that format provides necessary experience to students getting ready for the state tournament.
• Debate will run five rounds for all events and will be power-matched High/High in rounds 3-5.
• Placing for the tournament will reflect teams’ combined speech and debate scores.
• We are planning on allowing students to double at their own risk across either Public Forum or LD and any speech events that do not require prep time. However, to accommodate this plan we need to have enough debate judges to single flight those events. If we need to double flight, it will be impossible to double from debate into speech. This tournament will run on time--- students who are attempting to double and miss the start time of their next debate round will forfeit that round.
• We will ask you to supply one judge for every five speech entries or fraction thereof and every four debate entries or fraction thereof. Please try to align your ratio of speech to debate judges with your ratio of speech to debate entries. We anticipate that it will be easier to find volunteers to judge speech, but again without enough debate judges we have to double flight and lose the ability to allow students to double.
• There will be no entry fee at this tournament.
• We do not plan on distributing awards at this meet. The price  of ribbons and trophies alone, without factoring in the cost of shipping them and the logistical challenges of organizing them, would make this cost prohibitive. We will post our award ceremony as a series of separate videos for each event. Coaches and individual students can than share as needed to publicize their achievement. Please make sure to input phonetic pronunciations for your students’ names into Speechwire to make these videos as correct as possible.
• Congress will use bills from the January docket. I will announce the specific bills once that docket is published.
• World Schools will compete impromptu rounds 1 and 5. We will announce prepared motions for rounds two through four in December.
• Lincoln Douglas and Public Forum will use the January/February NSDA Topics
• Radio will compete Rd 1 5 minute News Program, Rd 2 News Program, Rd 3 OTS, Semifinal Editorial written at the tournament in a 30 minute prep window, Final Round compete 7 Minute News Program, edited to include the editorial from semifinals.
• Extemp will draw and prep for each round.  
• Impromptu will function according to the standard IHSFA 7 minute block. Students will be given their topic in their virtual competition room the same as at a typical meet.
• You will need to make sure all of your students have active speechwire.com accounts linked to your program. Please make sure to add your judges’ emails to the speechwire system. There are multiple helpful videos posted to speechwire.com that can help train your judges and competitors for how an online tournament will function.
• If you intend to have students competing over your school WiFi, it is absolutely critical that they test NSDA Campus over the network in advance. Your IT department will need to whitelist jitsi.org in order to make this happen. The key issues seem to come up with using Campus through Speechwire over school networks, so make sure you are testing through that configuration. We will use Zoom as a backup plan throughout the day for any rounds with significant tech issues, flowing through a designated tournament Zoom account.
• Please use our tournament specific email--- fisherstournament@gmail.com--- for any questions or tournament related issues.

Paul Kennedy

Head Speech and Debate Coach

Fishers High School

Manager contact information

Paul Kennedy
Email address: fisherstournament@gmail.com
Phone number: 3174597799

Mailing address

13000 Promise Rd
Fishers, IN 46038