Introducing the MDTA Cup

Alright, I'm very excited to be making this post. The idea for a season-long, cumulative award for Minnesota debaters has been kicked around for quite a while now, and I'm very grateful to the MDTA executive board for letting me help them put this together.

The goal of the MDTA Cup is to encourage participation and reward success at Minnesota debate tournaments. Any MN debater who competes at four our more MN tournaments is eligible. The MDTA Executive board is working on procuring the actual award hardware, but I have been assured that it will be of the utmost quality and impressiveness.

DJ did a fine job of introducing the award here. What follows is a more in-depth description of the points system.

Point Getters

One Point for Participation.
Everyone who competes at a tournament gets a point.

One Point for "Placing"

This point goes either to the top 8 entries (defined by the tournament), or whoever clears to the first elim round, whichever is larger.

Examples:

• If a tournament has no elim rounds, the top 8 entries get a point


• If a tournament breaks to semis, all semifinalists and the next four seeds get a point


• If a tournament breaks to quarters, all quarterfinalists get a point


• If a tournament breaks to double-octafinals, all double-octafinalists get a point

One Point for each elimination round won

One Point for winning a tournament with no elims


Point Caps

• An entry can earn a maximum of 5 points in a given weekend


• A team can count the points of its top two entries per division per weekend to it's yearly total.


• In theory, a team could win as many as 40 points in a weekend (5 point cap * 2 students * 4 events), but I don't think the tournament schedule has any weekends where that is possible.

Examples

• Rosemount CS enters the BJ tournament, which has no elims, and places 3rd. He gets two points - the "participation" point and the "place" point - for that weekend


• Eagan CM enters the BJ tournament, and is named champion. He gets three points - the "participation" point, the "place" point, and the "champion" point.


• Cooper RB enters the Highland park tournament, which breaks to semis. He misses the break at 5th seed, but gets the "place" point for being in the top 8, so two points total.


• Rosemount RR enters the Sibley tournament, which breaks to quarterfinals. He wins the quarterfinal round, but loses in Semis to Wayzata GS. Wayzata GS goes on to win the tournament. Rosemount RR gets 3 points (participation, place, win an elim). Wayzata GS gets 5 points (participation, place, win quarters, win semis, win finals).


• Eagan PM enters the Blake tournament, and makes it all the way to the final round. He would earn 6 points (participation, place, win doubles, win octas, win quarters, win semis) but the weekly point cap is 5, so he gets 5 points

What I'm Going to do
I've agreed to tabulate the results for the MDTA cup and post weekly updates with current standings on this blog.

What I need from you
For tournament directors, I need to know the official results of your tournament, including (a) all participants, (b) top 8 entries in order if there are no elims or if you break any less than 8 students and (c) full elim results, if any.

For all coaches who do data entry, paying attention to consistency will help me a ton. That means a few things: (a) You need to make sure the long form of your school name is always spelled the same, IE "Blake" or "The Blake School," you need to pick one and stick with it. (b) The same goes for students' names. (c) In team events, I need consistent team codes, so please stick to the "alphabetical order" method - Quam and Johnson need to be listed as "Saint Paul Central JQ". (d) Also, if you need to add additional letters to a team's code, that code needs to stick with them, so if you have "Wayzata RS" and "Wayzata ReS", then "Wayzata ReS" needs to stay that way even if RS aren't at the next tournament.

I can fix the little mistakes that we will all make along the way, but please make the effort to proof-read your entry sheet. It will make my life a lot easier and ensure you get timely updates.

Oh, and one last thing, please be good to one another. This is the first time we've tried something like this, so there are sure to be kinks along the way. I'm sure we'll have to make changes to the formula over time, so remember that the first year is an experiment. And this is meant to be fun and friendly, so if you are getting worked up about the MDTA cup, then you are doing it wrong.