A Tale of Two Academic Teams

Chapter 20: Gravy Training

Even though the Venomous Agendas' quiz bowl team return home from the HSNCT in 12th place, this is just the beginning of three weeks that would determine the future of the five Venomous Agenda debaters at Nationals. The first two weeks would be grueling to them, especially since the NSDA Nationals, this year, are held in Raleigh.

After driving overnight from Atlanta back to their hometown, the parents who drove are tired, but the players, who slept in the cars, appear to be relatively rested. "Joe, at the HSNCT, I got a few more contacts we could use to play practice rounds before Nats" Sadie texts Joe, while Joe does not realize Sadie had some practice crossfires on the topic in Atlanta, just not against other players at Nats.

"Who?" Joe asks Sadie.

"Boston Latin. We played against them at Columbia and lost. Our game was very tight and it could have gone either way"

"Chantal was very helpful to help me cut cards and all that, what about we go over our opening statements this afternoon and what we identified as ATs?"

"Absolutely. And then, if any of the teams whose contact information I collected at the HSNCT are willing to have a practice game tonight, we will play one"

"Honey, you made it to the top-one hundred scorers at the HSNCT, which no player at the NSDA Nationals ever achieved during the same season, at least not post-pandemic. If you make it to the top-fourteen at the NSDA Nationals, we'll have a surprise for you" Sadie's mother announces to her daughter.

"What makes top-fourteen such a big deal?" Sadie asks her mother.

"Top-fourteen means two things for NSDA Nats, assuming Joe keeps debating next year: you're qualified for the ToC and you return to Nats next year. You're the first debater at either national debate tournament to have made it to the top-fourteen at the HSNCT the same season in years, maybe even at all" her mother explains to her.

"When will that stop?" Sadie asks, irritated by her mother's constant references to other NSDA Nats players' performances at the HSNCT.

"Once the Nats end, I'm afraid. You have one opportunity to make it count, it's now"

After a little supplemental rest, Sadie goes to Joe's home in the afternoon, and he wastes no time making the opening statements available, as well as the cards cut with each AT they expect to be commonly facing. And a manifest of the evidence sources Chantal and Joe collected for cutting cards.

"Please, take your time to familiarize yourself with the cards and the research before we go over our opening statements and our ATs for rebuttal. Once we have done so, then we can think of scheduling a practice game" Joe tells Sadie the roadmap for the day.

"That's a lot of evidence to pore over, and equally many ATs. Fortunately, I am not starting from scratch since I had two occasions at the HSNCT to rehearse rough drafts of both opening statements and have practice crossfires based on that" Sadie tells him about her experience at the HSNCT.

"Really?" a surprised Joe gasps. "I expected quiz bowlers to be mostly accumulating knowledge in their heads!" 

"Joe, by now you must have realized quiz bowlers are typically smart kids, too. I mean, look at our own quiz bowlers. But honestly how I did it in my rehearsals at the HSNCT feels more like doing it in a parliamentary debate game, and the main difference is how to fit evidence in the speech. They never worried about the sources of evidence"

"You're right, most of the questions we asked and answered in crossfires this season were about arguments and very few dealt in the finer points of evidence"

Sadie starts reading the evidence supporting the arguments closest to what she claimed at the HSNCT, on both sides, because Joe's cards include what argument this evidence is used for at the top. So all I really needed to understand the topic and the ATs was already there after all... Sadie muses, while comparing her opening statements, written on the way to Atlanta, to the opening statements as written by Chantal and Joe. She then proceeds to read the ATs.