Days 2 & 3 - Debating and Waiting

Really simply - on Saturday I woke up and debated for the rest of the day. The rounds went like this -

Round 1 - Negative vs NATO Banning Depleted Uranium: We won, sort of a easy case to go up against....

Round 2 - Negative vs Stopping Expansion: Again, we won. I was really hoping that we would be able to go up against this case sometime.

Round 3- Affirmative: Win, the judge said that we just squeak by with a victory. I thought that we had a chance of both losing and winning this debate depending on some of the main issues so not to much of a surprise with the decision. It really could have gone either way though.

Round 4 - Negative vs GDP Defense Capability's 2.5% reform: Win, Aff. team ended up finishing in second place overall in the tournament.

Round 5 - Affirmative: Loss! At the beginning of this debate we were getting killed but we managed to almost tie it up in the rebuttal's. Close debate but I agree with the judges decision that we lost. The Negative team ended up winning first place in the tournament....

Round 6- Affirmative: Win! Wrap up the day by debating a first year team. Probably was the easiest debate of the day but I still feel really tired.

The teams that broke to the outrounds were announced the next morning and it ended up that that by brother Peter and his partner broke along with Eric and Aaron C. and Aidan and I. We faced the Coopers in the quarterfinals and they won on a 2-1 decision. We had actually talked on the way up about having a feeling that we were going to debate each other in the tournament.... I though that they deserved to win and we could have won as well but when you get to the outrounds many debates between good teams are so close that most turn out like that anyways. I was almost glad that we lost because I was just so tired from the previous days debates and really didn't have much energy to debate with anyways. I ended up watching some of the simifinals and correctly guessed the voting decision (2-1) on the debate I watched one minute debate began. I could tell that the judges didn't like the case by the way they tilted their heads when the 1AC speaker talked (really! I'm not kidding). After a great final round that was very enjoyable to watch there was the awards session. As far as speaker awards Aidan finished as the 8th overall speaker at the tournament and I finished in 2d place. Our group (counting the Eric and Aaron who are unofficial members of our club....) took three out of the top eight team placements. Peter and his partner Steven H. came in 7th place, Aaron and Eric 4th, and Aidan and myself 5th. Grace also won a award for being one of the top timers and Irgrid won the sweepstakes for bottle consumption.In the end the tournament was probably one of the most fun I have ever been to in my three years of doing debate (even more then when we won 1st place last year). There really wasn't any huge pressure to win and we really just had a lot of fun debating good teams.