I just wanted to post a few important notes that may help teams navigate their final entry decisions. First of all, to clarify, we are offering 2 tournaments, with part one (debate only) starting on Friday, which is officially part of the Aztec Tournament, and part 2 starting on Sat., which is an IE only tournament, hosted by Palomar College (this was the only available day they could host). The IE portion of "part 1" (the Aztec) is occurring on Sunday. The schedule in the invite also reflects this information, due to the overlapping nature of our tournaments, necessary to achieve our multi-format tournament objective.
All debate activities are associated, and to be entered under the Aztec Invitational Part 1.
LD conflicts: Any competitors doing NFA-LD may not enter any other events in pattern B, but may do up to the allowed 3 events in pattern A (unless also doing any version of 2x2 team debate).
As far as IE conflicts with debate activities on Sunday, here is the deal: teams wishing to enter students into pattern A events (which do conflict with the ongoing parli debate), may opt to place their NPDA debaters into pattern A AND B (which is already not conflicting) events, with the full knowledge and assumption of risk, that if those NPDA teams qualify for elimination rounds, that they must chose between dropping their pattern A events, or continuing on in debate. Since we hiring judges based on need, such drops during the tournament would not be refundable.
Advice: If you think your team debaters have a chance at doing well, consider sticking to the "avoid pattern A events" mantra, to prevent wasted entries. Exceptions to this policy may be made by the tournament director and/or tabulation staff, if the situation is reasonable and the tournament is otherwise running on time.
The Paul Gaske Award has been fully backed again this year, with a $500.00 cash prize for the top single competitor, who competes in BOTH team debate (2x2) and individual events. This will be based on points accumulated throughout the Aztec portion (part 1) of the tournament.
Judges: Please be aware that unless already arranged, judges for LD, need to be in the LD pool (under debate), if they are covering LD entries. We need to make sure that we have sufficient LD judges, and tend to keep that pool consistent.
Awards: Just for fun, I thought I would throw out the fact that when added up, we have 580 awards to give away! Each partner in partnering events (e.g., debate and duo) will receive separate hardware, and we want to give as much away as possible. :)