How To Get Involved

To learn more about our club, keep reading to learn about how our club functions – everything from how we run our meetings to how you can start going to tournaments. Also take a look at our tournament results and social media to see what we’re up to.

Weekly Meetings

For the most updated information, please refer to our How to Join page.

A weekly meeting typically starts with a quick debate lesson by our VP Training, followed by a debate round on a different motion each week! After the debate round, our judges give a call on who won the round, explanation for the call, as well as some feedback on how each team could improve for next time.

Tournaments

The best way to get better at debate is to attend competitive tournaments! We find that a lot of novices (this was definitely me in my two terms debating) regularly attend meetings, but are hesitant to go to tournaments for a number of reasons. For me, I was unsure if I could compete at a university level, and didn’t want to deal with the embarassment of ending the tournament bottom of the tabs.

What I’ve realised since is that there’s incredible value in just ripping off the band-aid. To begin with, you’re probably much better than you give yourself credit for and are NOT going to end up bottom of the tabs – and you can always judge/panel at a couple of tournaments before diving in headfirst. But besides this, tournaments are an actual blast – they’re the best way to meet (the very lovely!) people in the Canadian Debate circuit, make friends and bond with people in the club (I definitely have some core memories from tournaments), and get much, much better at debate in a short amount of time – the perspective you from competing against the country’s best debaters is simply unmatched.

So here’s how you can get involved!

• Finding partnerships – Unless you already have a debate partner, feel free to ask around in the club - you’ll be surprised at the number of people who would go to a tournament “if they just had a partner”. If this is something you feel awkard doing, feel free to still fill out the tournament form – in most cases, the exec team will be able to ask around and pair you up with someone else from the club who’d like to attend.

• Bidding – In the #tournament-info channel, we post a “bid form” for each tournament – this is the form you need to fill in if you’re interested in going to a tournament. Except for super competitive tournaments like WUDC, we’re likely to be able to send you as part of the UW contingent so long as you fill in the form before the deadline.

  The bid form helps the exec team guage tournament interest, and pair off debaters who signed up without partners. A couple of days after the bid forms are in, we’ll announce the final teams and judges who will make up our contingent for the tournament. You will then be added to a separate Discord channel consisting only of those travelling to the tournament.

• Travel and Billeting – once the teams are in, it’s time to figure out how to get to the tournament. We usually travel together in very very long bus/train trips to and fro the city the tournament is in. One of the best things about debate tournaments is the concept of billeting – which is when the hosting institution pairs you with someone from their club, and you crash at their place for the duration of the tournament. This is great for two reasons – you get to make new friends in the debate circuit, and don’t have to pay for expensive hotels or Airbnbs to attend tournaments.

• Funding and Expenditure – we’re able to completely subsidize team registration costs - which usually cost around 150-200 CAD! We usually pay travel costs out of pocket, but there is a small chance we may be able to re-imburse you for them depending on the tournament (this is NOT something you should bank on).

Regardless, the best way to get an introduction to how this looks is to watch our McGill Central Novs 2023 vlog:

Organising Waterloo Tournaments

We host two external tournaments throughout the year - Seagram’s IV in the winter, Waterloo HST in the spring. We also organize internal tournaments (e.g. Celestial Cup 2023 in honour of our alumni Celeste Laube). Opportunities to get involved in the organising committees for these events include being a Tournament Director (TD), Chief Adjudicator (CA), Equity Officer, or a Tab Director. In the case of Seagrams and internal tournaments, you could always debate if you’re still a novice, or just show up for the weekend be a judge!

Applications for these roles open up a couple of months before the tournament date, but do make sure to reach out to a member of the exec team at any point if you’re interested.

Exec Roles and Elections

At the end of each term, we host elections to vote on the exec team for the upcoming term. If you’re interested in applying for an exec role, look out for the Exec Apps post in the #exec-info channel on our Discord! Below is a list of roles you could apply for – do note that some of these (such as Equity Officer or VP Finance) do require some specialised training.