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Princeton High School is pleased to invite you to Princeton Invitational to be held on Saturday, March 14, 2020. As always, we will be offering competition in varsity and novice Lincoln-Douglas and Public Forum debate, as well as Congressional Debate. There will be eleven individual event (IE) categories including Dramatic Interpretation, Duo Interpretation, Humorous Interpretation, Oral Interpretation, Original Oratory, Extemporaneous Speaking, Impromptu Speaking, Improvisational Acting, Declamation, Program Oral Interpretation, and Informative Speaking. We are particularly excited to offer Parliamentary Debate this year, and hope many can take advantage of it.

E-Ballots will be used for all speech and debate events. Please remind your judges to bring a device (as well as a charger). E-ballots are incredibly easy and intuitive. We will again train all judges before the tournament begins.

Each year, we choose a non-profit organization in New Jersey and donate the school base fees collected from the tournament to them. This year, given that our team mascot is a wombat, our student leadership has decided to donate to World Wildlife Fund’s Australian Wildlife and Nature Recovery to promote awareness of climate change crisis as well as help restore lost forests and save wildlife. We will also sell stuffed wombats in the cafeteria for parents and students who are interested in supporting the cause.

There will be four double-flighted preliminary rounds in Lincoln-Douglas and Public Forum debate with breaks to finals only if time permits. LD & PF will have three divisions: novice, junior varsity and varsity. Parli will have two divisions: novice and varsity. We may combine the divisions if the pool of parli is limited. Please register your students for the appropriate division based on NJSDL rules.

There will be three preliminary rounds in all individual event (IE) categories with breaks to finals; in categories with sufficient numbers, we may break to semifinals, time permitting. Finally, there will be two sessions and a final round of Congressional Debate, with the possibility of a novice division depending on the number of entries. The usual complement of awards will be given to the top 6 competitors in all categories. Sweepstakes trophies will be awarded to the top 5 teams competing.

Competition will take place at Princeton High School (151 Moore Street, Princeton, NJ 08540). We will offer snacks and lunch in the cafeteria for the students. Judges’ lunch will be provided in the Judge’s Lounge which is known as the Learning Commons or the Library. Our tab rooms will be staffed with Princeton student officers, coaches, and other NJSDL officers and board members.

All NSDA and NJSDL rules for registration, source integrity, ethics, and timing are in effect. If you have questions, please consult the official NSDA and/or NJSDL rules. We will be using the NSDA March resolution for PF, and the March/April resolution for LD.

We will also follow the current Pilot Rules in PF -- three minute Summary Speeches, three minutes of prep and Coin Flips. Prep time in Policy will be 8 minutes and in LD 4 minutes. Internet use DURING rounds is permitted in ANY EVENT, but COMMUNICATION with persons other than the judge, opponent(s) and partner (if any) is STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

Extemp Prep: Black Box Theater (BBT), located near the Performing Arts Center on the 100 floor.

All registration must be completed via speechwire.com. If you have never used this site before or would like assistance, please let us know and we can assist. Speechwire will accept up to six (6) entries per school per category. We reserve the right to place any further entries on a waitlist, subject to room and judge availability. Coaches will receive notifications if and when we are able to clear the waitlist.

Only students who are sponsored by a degree-granting institution are permitted to compete. No individual or “lone wolf” entries are permitted. We do allow double-entries across all the IE events only. Mavericks in Public Forum are not permitted. There are no double-entries permitted in any debate event, or across speech and debate events.

On-site school registration will begin at 8:00 a.m. Judges’ meeting will be held at 8.45am in the Judge’s Lounge. First round will begin promptly at 9:15 a.m. A complete tournament schedule will be available on speechwire.com. Please refer to the following page for details.

We need somewhat stable students counts so that we can best prepare our venues for your arrival. To that end, we will begin assessing nuisance fees for any registration changes other than name changes after 5pm on Monday, 03/11. We will lock registration at 3pm on the day before the tournament. Any changes after that point must be communicated directly to the tournament staff via email or at on-site registration the next day.

All Congress bills must be emailed to Cecilia Birge (PrincetonInvitational@gmail.com) by the end of the day on Monday, March 9. A legislation packet will be made available shortly thereafter.

Our fee structure is below. All payments should be made out to Princeton Speech & Debate. Please send payments to:

These fees are designed to discourage schools and teams from doing things that make our job of running the tournament extremely difficult. We would prefer not to charge these fees – we would much rather have a smooth-running tournament that brought in less for our fundraising efforts than a chaotic and lucrative one.

Teams must provide one (1) judge for every three (3) entries or fraction thereof.

Student debaters with at least two full years of experience may be used as judges for Novice LD or Novice PF ONLY, so long as they are marked as such in registration notes. Failure to do so may result in a judge fee being assessed to your team. For example, if a team has one novice PF entry and two varsity PF entries, a student judge WILL NOT fulfill the total obligation, only the novice entry.

Teams must provide one (1) judge for every five (5) entries or fraction thereof.

When registering your judges, if you have a judge who is able to judge your own team without conflict, please mark him or her as “clean” on the drop-down menu. Judges like these are very valuable to the tournament. If a “dirty” judge is marked clean, a judge fee may be assessed to your team.

We may be forced to assign judges based on need, regardless of category. This is something we will try never to do, but if circumstances demand it, it would be helpful for coaches to let us know of any judges who would feel more comfortable doing this. That said, speech judges can and will be used to judge Congress rounds. Please prepare your judges for this possibility.

All teams competing must provide at least one judge, regardless of their obligations. We ask this for scheduling purposes, and to ensure the diversity of the judging pool.

We will, as usual, conduct a brief overview session for judges at approximately 8:45am. While we strive to alleviate confusion and answer all questions, we cannot spend the time to fully train judges.

We look forward to seeing you on March 14th, 2020! Please contact Cecilia Birge (PrincetonInvitational@gmail.com) with any questions.

Cecilia X. Birge
Email address: PrincetonInvitational@gmail.com
Phone number: 7328202222

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