Social Psychology with Jeff

Many of us remember what life was like when the transition to emergency remote speech and debate competitions occurred in Spring 2020. Most tournaments after approximately mid-March were cancelled, and the main tournaments that were able to occur—the Tournament of Champions and NSDA Nationals—occurred through classrooms.cloud. This created the first immediate pivot during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it accomplished the goal of allowing students to attempt to finish their year with a somewhat normal experience during the most unnormal of times.

However, a second pivot occurred around mid-June 2020. Community leaders realized that much of the 2020-2021 season would be online. There was hope that late-spring year-end tournaments may have returned to in-person competition (something that would occur in spring 2022), but there was a need for an almost immediate pivot for entirely online speech and debate competitions. This led to a substantial portion of the tournament-management contingency trying to work together to try and make something work.

The people responsible for speech and debate technology did exemplary work. They pivoted to a new strategic plan of trying to develop the infrastructure needed to make any speech and debate tournament possible. They developed NSDA Campus, which allowed local leagues to survive and other tournaments to occur with a national or global presence, and pivoted existing technology (e.g., Tabroom, SpeechWire, and other platforms) to exist together. The speech and debate techies saved the community by allowing anything to occur at all.

With that said, there were the tournament-specific and league-specific communities that had to figure out how to translate an in-person activity to an online activity. The stakes for everyone were high. If the September tournaments succeeded, there would be enough buy-in to try and continue with a mostly virtual speech and debate season until summer 2021 (which, at the time, we hoped would lead to a return to in-person tournaments). If the September tournaments failed, large parts of the community would have given up on the idea of speech and debate until in-person competitions could occur—something that is only now starting to return in a hybrid state.

Overall, we found a way to provide almost normal experiences in an uncertain and chaotic world. Students were able to compete and those with the highest vested interest were able to finish their speech and debate career. Coaches were able to organize their team to compete during the year. The immediate pivot to salvage 2020 turned into a short-term pivot to make 2020-2021 work. The work done during 2020-2021 helped plan for the mostly remote 2021-2022 and the journey to a hybrid community in 2022 and beyond.

This post is an attempt to commemorate the second pivot while using those lessons to help with the current situation many of us are in today. Here are my takeaways for next steps as we traverse a hybrid speech and debate community from fall 2022 onwards:

1. The community will likely remain in a hybrid format for the next few years. Many tournaments will return to being in person. Many will remain fully online. Both will allow for the balance of in-person group activities while expanding debate as communities begin the long-term recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.
2. I am unsure whether concurrent hybrid tournaments will work. Some tournaments will attempt to become hybrid, but they will face many of the costs, resource needs, and challenges of both in-person and online tournaments. They will also face the challenges of inequity when one or more competitors will be able to have nonverbal or informal communication with one or more judges because they are in the same room while one or more competitors will not. It may be doable to have full divisions occur in-person and online, but that can easily lead to a tournament becoming mostly online since full teams will want to stick together.
3. Numbers will be down until they regrow. Fall 2022 is the tail end of two years of reduced novice recruitment. Speech and debate camps had lower enrollment last summer. Tournaments that usually have higher enrollment are currently experiencing lower enrollment. Between reduced or eliminated team budgets and increased travel costs, many tournaments will have lower entries until teams have a few years to rebuild. However, early hopeful signs are increased registrations in novice divisions and increased novice recruitment overall.
4. Many changes that occurred because of two years mostly online speech and debate are here to stay. The increased in focused and nuanced arguments, the use of technology in rounds, and having shorter competition days are changes that are likely to stay. I think it is very likely that the norms developed in the last two years will influence how students and judges expect tournaments to occur in 2022-2023. While many people may want to go back to what tournaments were like in 2019, many of the people who currently compete or judge are most familiar with speech and debate during the pandemic.

Looking forward, here are three challenges that I think will guide where speech and debate goes for the next five years:

1. What will the balance between accessibility and in-person gatherings look like? The last tournament that I co-ran before this post was one of the first large-scale full-service in-person tournaments of the 2022-2023 season. The energy of in-person competition is real, and the ancillary experiences that did not translate well (or occur at all) from online experiences were many of the group- and self-enriching experiences that makes this activity worth it. However, accessibility—whether due to health concerns, funding and logistical concerns, or student and team wellbeing—will often necessitate less tournaments overall or more of a mix of in-person or hybrid tournaments. Going back to 100% in-person will eliminate the accessibility advances that occur with online competition. Going to 100% online competition removes much of the community-building aspects that keeps people motivated to compete, judge, and run tournaments. Tournaments will have to consider how they want to interact with their local, regional, and national-circuit communities when deciding how a tournament should occur.
2. What will the tradeoff between competition experiences and student and judge burnout look like? On average, judges are much more likely to no-show a round than students. It is also often true that the median long-term vested interest in students competing is much higher than the median long-term vested interest in a person judging speech and debate rounds. Online schedules allowed for more friendly judging commitments, and many people working and living remotely meant that it was much more feasible to have three-day tournaments with students and judges available to run rounds. Now, with the return to in-person tournaments, having people take a workday off to evaluate rounds makes it much harder for those rounds to occur. Furthermore, rounds going until late Sunday night now has the added cost of travel from the tournament back home or an extra night’s hotel. The tradeoff here is between the desire for high-quality rounds compared to the ability to sustainably have judges evaluate these rounds. Speaking of judges…
3. Student recruitment will bounce back faster than judge recruitment. Judge recruitment, training, and experience will be the largest challenge going forward. The largest capacity restriction for growth will be having to replace or generate new judges that can be trained to evaluate speech and debate competitions. Schedules need to be designed to promote judges wanting to come back to judge and gain experience throughout their time within the community. Former high school competitors will often judge, but the expectation now is for these judges (which includes me) to be paid for their time and expertise.
   
   This will lead to one of two outcomes. Either schedules will have to change to manage long-term volunteer judge retention, or the cost to participate will increase. Both options are possible and will lead to implicit or explicit changes in how the activity will evolve for the next five to 10 years.

I am aware of the irony that a place to show my research portfolio for my work in social psychology has two posts regarding high school speech and debate as its last two posts. I am also aware that these posts are two years apart. However, the general insights—modality and accessibility challenges, differences in attendee preferences and accessibility, and rebuilding group norms, sustainable event capacity, and defining who we are and who we want to be—can cross-apply to many aspects of professional life.