Useful Debate Resources on the Web

Any collection of links is going to be a bit disorganized. These are ones that have proven useful, with a brief comment. This is also a work in progress, so don't be surprised if it stops abruptly or changes frequently.

Debate Associations

These are major leagues at the high school and college level. The websites have access to useful educational and other material.

  • National Parliamentary Debate League: The NPDL hopes to be the primary national parliamentary debate league at the high school level. It arose out of the high school parliamentary debate community on the West Coast, but has a national membership. It sponsors the Parli Tournament of Champions each year, usually in early April. Membership is free; details on their website.
  • National Speech and Debate Association: The NSDA, formerly the NFL or National Forensic League, is the oldest and largest high school debate organization in the US. They set the rules for most of the speech and debate formats in the US, maintain tabroom.com, the tabbing software service, and are involved in related educational activity. The NSDA holds a national championship tournament each year.
  • National Catholic Forensic League: The NCFL was established by Catholic secondary schools but accepts all schools as members. It largely runs in parallel with the NSDA, offering similar speech and debate tournaments. The NCFL holds a national championship tournament each year.
  • American Parliamentary Debate Association: The APDA is a college debate league, primarily East Coast. The "Guide to APDA" link under "About" is a good intro to Parli debate and has links to APDA debate videos. There used to be a series of "Novice Mentor" articles that were useful.

Debate Educational Resources

There are zillions of debate websites, with new ones appearing and old ones being re-posted or diappearning all the time. The CDA extemporaneous policy debate format is used nowhere else, so most of the specific references are to various forms of parliamentary debate. Parli is closest to CDA in style and philosophy, but be aware that the speech timings, order and various other details may differ. The central concepts of argument, rebuttal and presentation are the same.

  • Learning Debate: This site has a debate text written by Stephen Quinn, a former World Schools format champion debater. The text can be downloaded in pdf format in several languages, or can be purchased as a paperback. There are also a set of presentation slides for teaching, also in pdf format.

Debate Tournament Software

CDA currently uses tabroom.com to manage all of its tournaments from registration through results. tabroom replaced TRPC, which was the first computer-based tab program we used.

  • tabroom.com: tabroom.com was developed by Chris Palmer and is now sponsroed by the NSDA. It is free, robust, and, so far, constantly improving. There is fairly good online documentation, and a large user community. If you have to tab a tournament, this is the easises place to start.
  • Joy of Tournaments: JoT is a major competitor to tabroom, and it is not free. It seems to have a fairly large user community.
  • Tab Room on the PC: TRPC runs on Windows PCs and still seems to run under Windows 10. It's very old school, but quite serviceable if you need to tab a tournament and don't have internet access.