So, over the weekend I attended the Trinity College Dublin Debating Intervarsities.
It was a fun weekend, if a bit chaotic.
71 teams of 2 people each, along with judges and assorted hangers-on as well as the Trinity people themselves who obviously can’t compete at their own event. The end result was a lot of people, mostly drunk, having a laugh. Good times.
It wasn’t all good though, frankly the organisation of the weekend left a bit to be desired, the Trinity people seemed to forget that many of us had never been to the college and so didn’t have anything resembling a guide system to get people to the rooms they were debating at.
This was especially glaring as they had the rooms all over the campus – which meant that you could spend half of the 15 minutes that you had to prepare for the debate just getting to the debate.
Also, their arts building is incredibly confusing and on one occasion that I was there for (though I know it happened more often) a team I was debating with walked in just as the debate was starting – it having taken them 15minutes precisely to find where they were supposed to be.
Also, the food on offer wasn’t great and again, the occasional disorganisation went into this too – I doubt half the people there Saturday morning got the breakfast that Trintiy were giving out – and once again, this was down to poor organisation I felt.
I’m also a bit disappointed with my results at the competition, though I’m still trying to decide what all the results I was given mean. For example, prior to the quaters (I’m guessing that the tab, as it’s called, was printed up just before the quaters) myself and my partner came 51st out of 71teams. I assume that we stayed in that position as the only thing that should have changed after the tab was printed was the positions of the top 16 teams.
Yet despite our poor showing that that would seem to indicate (though we did beat half the UCC teams there – 11th out of 22 teams UCC sent), we seem to have better team speaker points than many of the teams that came above us in the tab. An example – we got 689 points (the top team got 795) yet the teams at 43rd,44th,45th and 46th all got lower than us. In fact, 46th had a speaker points of 580! So looking at this I’m choosing to take the ‘moral victory’ route – we were a better team, just against harder players.
My own tab came in at 73rd out of 142 speakers. Not too bad, though the numbers are a bit screwy as for example I’m one of 4 speakers at 73 and there no 142nd place, but there is two 141sts.. It’s a bit of a better an indication though, as this tab runs directly on how your speaker points came. I’m happy enough with my place UCC wise on this too – 16th of the 22 sent. Yet given that this was my first IV and that 10 of UCC’s speakers (all in that 16 I just mentioned) made it to the quaterfinals, I think i did ok.
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