Congratulations to Nueva’s Ritika Savla & Eliya Wee for winning NPDL Spring in the Open Division, on a 3-2 decision on the resolution, “When in conflict, governments should prioritize mitigating existential risks (i.e. nuclear war, climate change) over reducing suffering in humans and animals.” Menlo-Atherton HS (Allegra Hoddie & Gustav Singel) were runners-up.
Congratulations as well to Princeton High Schools’s Hu & Wang for winning the March Columbia University Parli Invitational on a 4-0 decision!
-Nate Berls, NPDL Curriculum Director
Image courtesy of Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School
How I Built a Thriving Parli Team From Scratch—And How You Can Too
Ethan Bordoff, junior at Hunter College High School, NPDL Correspondent
Three days and three rounds. That was the extent of my parliamentary debate experience when I entered my sophomore year as founder and head of my school’s parli team. I felt vastly unprepared, learning as I taught. Practice attendance was low, tournament attendance even lower, and almost nobody outside of our team even knew parli existed. This year, I did almost everything differently, and the changes we made have been a huge step in the right direction. I’ve also taken on a role as a member of the New York Parliamentary Debate League’s (NYPDL) Onboarding Committee, where I help students and coaches make the right choices for their teams. In this article, I’ll share the five most important pieces of advice I give to those looking to start or expand a parli team, the tips I wish I’d gotten before I started my team. While every team’s journey is unique, these tips are essential for building a strong foundation.
1. Advertise, Advertise, Advertise
I cannot stress this enough. Every high school has dozens of extracurriculars to join, and you are competing against them. Luckily, parli sells itself. It’s an academic extracurricular, it’s popular in college, and team members get to discuss almost every topic imaginable—including many less-than-serious ones—and there’s no required work outside of practices and tournaments. (That said, a major error is to characterize parli as a low-commitment, unserious extracurricular. I did that my first year, and though it got some people to come, by the end of the year I hadn’t seen many of them at practice for months.)
At the start of the year, before you hold any interest meetings, make sure that students have heard of parli and will attend: Hang posters advertising what parli has to offer, start an Instagram account and follow students at your school, spread the word through friends, have food at the meeting, ask your faculty advisor or a favorite teacher to advertise the team to their class (a teacher with six classes and thirty students per class can advertise to almost two hundred students in a single day). Even if nobody really knows what parli is beforehand, you can use this interest meeting to hook them. It’s crucial to do this as early as possible, since many students (myself included) are hesitant to join new extracurriculars later in the year.
Once the meeting has passed, keep advertising. Keep those posters up, share photos on Instagram of your team having fun at practice or tournaments, tell members to advertise parli to their friends, and make it explicitly clear that meetings will have donuts (this last one works much better than you might think). Hopefully, you should have a decent amount of returning members.
2. Utilize Free Resources
One of the reasons that I love parli so much is that despite the fact that it’s competitive, it has one of the nicest and most helpful communities that I’ve been a part of. Resources from leagues such as the NPDL or NYPDL are on the leagues’ websites, and they have slideshows covering a variety of lesson plans that you can use to guide your practices. I’ve personally used NPDL and NYPDL resources almost exclusively to teach my team, and they’ve saved countless hours in planning and ensured my team had access to high quality instructional material.
To gain experience before the year starts, opportunities like summer camps or mentorship programs are a great path to take. Camps give you the experience you need in a short time frame, and mentors can meet with you throughout the year to help address problems that arise with your team and give you advice. To get you started, the NYPDL runs a free, virtual, summer camp each year and has a free mentorship program open to all; you can find links to both on their website.
3. Make Practice Engaging
Make sure you know the material you’re presenting. You don’t have to be an expert on it, but for example, if you followed item two and are using outside slideshows, make sure you’ve read through them, can present them without reading from the slides, and are prepared to answer questions. From experience, team members immediately disengage when you’re trying to understand each slide as you present it. They can tell!
Next, make sure that lessons aren’t just lectures. Do drills after a slideshow and make sure to ask for examples as you go along. Since your team members know you might ask for their input or ask them to try skills themselves, they will be much more engaged. Collaborative drills (for example, creating refutations to a case together on the day that you cover how to respond to arguments) take the pressure off of individual students, allow you to guide your team members with hints, and encourage teamwork with students building off of each other.
However, ensure that you also give your team members ample chances to just debate. I hold practice four days a week and have found that alternating between practice rounds and lessons works well. Not only does this make practices fun, but it takes the lessons from abstract to useful by allowing students to implement what they learned. Having motions related to what you taught in the previous lesson (such as economics or politics) is a great way to encourage that. Practice rounds also help team members build up confidence to compete.
Lastly, one of my favorite parts about parli is that as far as academic extracurriculars go, it’s really fun. Use that to your advantage in meetings. Use pop culture motions as for drills, read funny contentions for your team to respond to or weigh against, let team members choose which motions they want to debate, or even add jokes into your slideshows. I find that team members stay the longest and are the most engaged when we’re still learning but not taking everything too seriously (just make sure that you can still get serious when you need to be). The last part of running your team to focus on is tournaments…
4. Compete as Soon and as Often as Possible
The best way to learn is to compete. Tournaments are fun, and tournament success is a great way to improve the legitimacy of parli within your school. (Make sure to share your accomplishments and maybe some fun photos through social media, emails, or your school’s announcements system, if it has one.)Many novices are reluctant to compete, especially early in the season. I find that it’s a combination of not thinking that they will do well, and tournaments being a hassle in terms of travel, judging, and time commitment.
If novices are worried about how they will perform at their first competition, look for tournaments with split novice and varsity divisions. This will ensure that your teams don’t have a bad experience against experienced debaters, and their rounds are as evenly matched. Most West Coast tournaments have these, and since it’s novice, even if you’re on the East Coast it's unlikely that your teams would run into advanced progressive arguments (Ks or Theory). However, some East Coast tournaments also have split divisions, usually those run by colleges (such as Brown or Columbia’s annual tournaments). However, if tournaments with only one division, such as those run by the NYPDL, work best, that shouldn’t be a dealbreaker—just make sure to remind them that these tournaments are harder, but are the best way to improve. Next, let your team members know why they should compete early on. This is their only novice year, so they should make the most of the easier opponents and path to elimination rounds, and early on in the year, all novices have the same amount of experience. The longer they wait to compete, the more they risk falling behind. Lastly, if you as a competitor have performed poorly at a tournament (especially your first one), letting your novices know that can be strangely relieving. They likely look up to you as a standard for a “good debater,” and the fact that you don’t always do well takes a lot of pressure off of them to succeed right away.
If tournaments are expensive or far away, see if you can get your school or the tournament organizers to waive the fees of those for whom these fees would be a barrier to entry, and try to organize carpools or groups to take public transportation together. Online tournaments can also be a great way to avoid these issues, as they’re often cheaper than in-person ones. Some are even free: the NYPDL runs free online tournaments monthly. If there is a parli organization in your area that runs shorter tournaments (such as the Connecticut Debate Association or Golden Gate Speech Association’s four-round tournaments), these can be great first tournaments for your novices, before they know that they’re willing to devote a whole weekend to parli. Additionally, trying to encourage your teams to all go to a specific tournament is a great strategy, since it makes the experience more social and fun. Having a team dinner or ice cream run after an in-person tournament helps create the lasting friendships that strong teams are built on. For online tournaments, try creating a group chat for competitors instead.
5. Be Patient And Celebrate Success
Even if you’re doing everything right, building a successful team takes time. There will be practices when nobody shows up, and tournaments where every team does badly. Celebrate your wins: it doesn’t matter if a school had eight teams break, you can be just as happy that your first team ever broke. Remember what your team looked like (if it existed) before you started running it, and think about how far you’ve come; your novices who made it to elimination rounds learned everything they know about parli from you. If you’re a junior or senior, consider thinking, later in the year, about who you might want to run the team once you graduate. Make sure that you find someone who you’re confident can continue what you started, and maybe even have them co-captain with you for a year to give them the necessary experience if you can.
Two years in, I still have days when I wait for half an hour only for nobody to show up to practice and weeks where only one team comes. But I also have days where nearly the whole team is present and weeks where I see almost every partnership. My team hasn’t won the TOC or swept states (yet!), but I’m happy with the progress that we’ve made. I hope, just maybe, in a few years, new captains will be aiming to reach the heights of the very best teams—perhaps even yours.
Ethan Bordoff is a junior at Hunter College High School in NYC, serves on Onboarding and Outreach Committee of the NYPDL Board, founder and captain of Hunter’s parli team, and National Parliamentary Debate League Correspondent.
