The National Junior Forensic League National Tournament is being held in Bowling Green, KY on the campus of Western Kentucky University. Competition begins on Friday, June 27 and concludes on Sunday, June 29.

Public Forum Debate is one of the events. The NJFL will be debating the same topic that was used at last week’s NFL National Tournament in Las Vegas.

The basement of the NFL National Office in Ripon, Wisconsin was flooded while personnel were in Las Vegas.

The final round of Public Forum Debate from the 2008 Missouri State High School Activities Association State Speech, Debate, and Drama Championships is now online.

Max Mikitish & Susan Taylor from Liberty High School defeated Dan Schultz & Lindsey Zhang from Springfield Central on a 3-0 decision to win the Public Forum Debate championship. Both teams have qualified for the 2008 NFL National Tournament in Las Vegas.

Schultz & Zhang took 3rd place at the 2006 NFL National Tournament.

I received The Rostrum last Friday and freaked out when I saw the topic release schedule on page 4. The schedule does not match what I used for the Crossfire Briefs brochure. It shows one topic for March & April.

After a quick exchange of emails with a few people, including the NFL National Office, it was determined that the topic release schedule in The Rostrum was wrong.

The corrected version of the topic release schedule is in the online version of The Rostrum.

The California High School Speech Association has been under fire for scheduling the state tournament during passover (discussed here and here).

It turns out that the Missouri State High School Activities Association has the same conflict.

Sundown that day signals the start of Passover, one of the most important events on the Jewish calendar and a date that this year conflicts with the finals of the annual Missouri State High School Activities Association high school debate, speech and drama competition.

“It’s a major holiday,” said Rebeccah [Singer]. “They would never do this on Easter or Ash Wednesday. That would never happen.”

I was scanning the NDT-CEDA listserv (collegiate policy debate) looking for any TOC-related announcements from Dr. Patterson and discovered that the biggest topics of conversation are NDT preparations (no surprise) and the legitimacy of pie-throwing in debate. If you are really interested, you can scan the archived messages.

Sigh.

Victory Briefs Daily has an interesting interview with Dr. JW Patterson, the Director of Forensics at the University of Kentucky and founder of the Tournament of Champions.

The addition of Public Forum Debate at the TOC is briefly discussed.

MTV’s Made will air a new episode tomorrow [Saturday, March 8] at 2pm ET/PT featuring Aja Gerrity from Ridgefield High School (Go Spudders!) in Washington. Aja wants to become an intellectual and she uses speech and debate to start her journey.

The NFL website has an extended story on the experience, including personal statements from Aja and her coach, Ken Bisbee.

Mahesha Subbaraman (Trinity Briefs and Colloquy) and Brandon Sheats (Georgia Forensics Daily) have teamed up to launch the Loquitur podcast. What is Loquitur?

…a brand-new Internet podcast dedicated to interviewing academic and professional experts on current National Forensic League debate topics for the free educational benefit of high school students competing in Lincoln-Douglas and Public Forum Debate.

They have launched with two recordings complete. The first podcast talks about the goals and objectives of Loquitur. The second is an interview with an expert on the March/April Lincoln-Douglas topic.