We’ve reached the point in the year where the noise fades away, and one tournament looms tall in every debater’s mind: NITOC. Like it or not, the regular season is drawing to a close, and everything you do from now until late May will be (or at least should be) about NITOC. You could ignore NITOC and keep doing what you’re doing: treat your precious few remaining tournaments like any other, stick with the same schedule, etc. But this will set you up to fail. One of the most important principles of any intense mission is:
What got you here won’t get you there.
This simple phrase isn’t to say your current habits are bad for the phase of life that you developed them in. It’s saying that your current habits are specific to the time, place, and goals for which they were built. NITOC is a categorically different level of the debate game. What works in the regular season is not guaranteed to work at NITOC. NITOC, simply put, plays by different rules.
What are those rules? That’s what I want to cover in this article.
Improvement requires time and effort.
You probably already understand this fairly well, but it’s worth repeating. If you want to be good at something, you need to put in time and hard work to practice it. You aren’t going to waltz into NITOC and win rounds without dedicating yourself to those late-night briefing sessions, frustratingly repetitive 1AC and 1NC readings, or countless practice rounds with your clubmates, friends, or even enemies. You know what to do, even if you may not want to. Every elite debater knows that there’s no cheat code; you need to work to get the skills.
That being said, there’s a second, equally important principle to keep in mind…
Time and effort do not guarantee success.
You can “go through the motions” of drills, practice rounds, and you can have all the Neg Briefs in the world, but that won’t guarantee elite results. You need to learn the right lessons from your successes and your failures. Going to 15 tournaments in the regular season won’t do much good if you don’t properly assess why you are winning or why you are losing. Conversely, if you only do 5 tournaments but you learn the right things from your experience, you are probably better off.
This is why good coaching is so critical. Coaching isn’t about teaching the debate basics; it’s about watching your rounds and telling you where you are messing up. When you’re the one debating, it’s hard to objectively reflect on the round. A skilled coach, or a trusted friend, can identify failure points that you are often blind to.
Learning lessons is the purpose of practice. Learn the right lessons.
Irrational optimism wins.
It’s easy to be pessimistic. It’s easy to say, “It’s so over.” These are comfortable thoughts, because you’re absolving yourself of responsibility. You’re functionally saying, “there’s nothing more I can do.” If you accept that, you will probably not do anything. After all, you’ve decided further effort will be fruitless. This is a mentality that’s guaranteed to lose.
Being optimistic is harder. The optimist says, “It’s never over, I can still change my fate.” So the optimist acts. Optimism is always action-oriented; it’s a high-agency mindset that takes on responsibility rather than abdicating it. It’s more difficult to shoulder that responsibility, but it also pushes you to action. And winners win by action, not inaction.
Notice that this logic (that the optimist is more action-oriented and successful than the pessimist) is true regardless of the circumstances. That means if you want to maximize your success, you need to be optimistic even at times when it makes no sense to be. Ignore bad power-matching. Don’t panic about how your last round went; focus on the next one. Don’t let the gloom of a bad tournament make you pessimistic about the next one.
Winners believe that they are at the helm of their lives. They are right. Losers don’t believe that. They are also right.
Fundamentals still matter, but focus on the intangibles.
Early in your debate career, you learned the fundamentals: 4-point refutation, the 4 ways to respond to an argument, the structure of a DisAd, etc. These remain important, and I would never tell you to neglect them. However, they aren’t everything. Especially not at NITOC.
What matters at NITOC is hard to explain. I’ve seen other coaches describe it as an “energy”, something vague and intangible. I think of it as “who wants to be in the fight” vs “who wants to escape.” In other words, are you trapped in the round with them, or are they trapped in there with you?
If you walk into the room, don’t make eye contact with your judges or opponents, quietly set up your stuff, and give a passive performance, you’re going to lose. The entire room can sense it. If you glance around nervously and proceed to give a scatterbrained halting performance…you will lose. If you are the most confident, assertive team in the room, and always taking the initiative, chances are you will win.
We often think of confidence and assertiveness as outputs; results of having a strong Aff case or a killer Neg brief. And they often are. However, the key to remember is that confidence is also an input to the most important question of the round: who does the judge vote for? Judges, for better or worse, use vibes in the room to tip the scales when everything else is close. If one team acts like their argument is round-ending, and the other team seems to think so too, judges will vote on that argument.
Be the team that brings that energy into the room.
Don’t let yourself make decisions in the moment.
In the moment, you are feeling all kinds of emotions: fear, embarrassment, anger, pride, remorse. Don’t get overwhelmed. A powerful exercise is to disconnect yourself from the current moment. Avoid asking “what should I do?” and instead ask “what would the version of myself from 9 months ago say I should do?” Set a past version of yourself in the driver’s seat. That past version of yourself has the same dreams of great success, but they also have the long-term vision that you lack in the moment.. In the same vein, ask what a future version of yourself would do.
If you know that the intensity of the moment and the turmoil of emotions are clouding your judgment, shift your judgment process to something unaffected by the intensity and the emotions. This is hard to do, but it’s critical for avoiding impulsive mistakes.
Final words: Take this seriously.
Before every NITOC, my coach would tell me, “You will remember this week for the rest of your life.” So far, he’s been 100% right. NITOC is the culmination of the years you have spent building your skills, learning about debate and about the world, and becoming the team that you are today. You have poured a huge amount of your life and identity into this sport. You owe it to yourself to take it seriously.
NITOC is undeniably desperate. Dreams are broken or fulfilled at NITOC. You will see your friends take crushing losses and glorious triumphs; chances are, you will too. For competitive teams, desperation is a core part of the NITOC experience. However, that energy can be channeled despair or into fueling you to push harder.
So go at it with all you’ve got. Allow the competitive juices to run rampant. Work as hard as you can, stay up late, get up early, practice more than you think you should. Do everything in your power to ensure that if you lose, you can look back and say, ‘I gave it my all.’ There is nothing worse than losing, knowing that you could have done more.
Charlie Said - NITOC Champion 2022