Breaking the Circuit: The fight for equal opportunity in debate.

Imagine stepping into a competition where your opponent has access to the best coaches, years of elite training, and unlimited resources—while you’re left piecing together prep between school, work, and a team that barely gets by. Imagine entering a debate round knowing that no matter how much effort you put in, the circuit has already decided who’s more likely to win. You have spent countless hours perfecting your arguments, refining your speaking style, and researching every possible counterargument, only to realize that your opponent walked into the room with a full coaching staff, a decade of institutional knowledge backing them, and a support system that has spent years preparing them for this exact moment. This is the reality of debate today. The circuit is broken, and the gap between local and national competition has grown so wide that, for many debaters, it feels impossible to cross.

For some, debate is a world of national tournaments, expensive summer camps, and full-time coaching. It is a well-oiled machine where students receive professional training, gain access to elite prep materials, and have mentors guiding them every step of the way. They travel across the country, accumulating TOC bids and gaining recognition before they even enter their senior year. For others, debate looks entirely different. It means scraping together case files, searching for free online lectures in place of professional instruction, and relying on a small group of dedicated teammates—or sometimes just themselves—to figure out strategies that others have been taught for years. It means training in isolation, having to self-teach complex argumentation, and walking into a round knowing that their opponent’s prep was likely reviewed by a coach who has spent decades mastering this activity. The difference between these two worlds isn’t intelligence, dedication, or potential. It’s funding. It’s connections. It’s access.

Some schools have the resources to send their teams to tournaments across the country, providing their debaters with the opportunity to compete at the highest levels and gain recognition from judges who have influence over the national circuit. Others struggle to afford local competitions, relying on whatever limited funding they can get from their schools—if they get any funding at all. Some debaters work with national champions and experienced coaches, reviewing round recordings and receiving targeted feedback to improve their performance. Others have to piece together whatever advice they can find online, learning through trial and error in real rounds where the stakes are high, and the margin for mistakes is slim. It isn’t about who works the hardest or who has the most talent—it’s about who can afford to stay in the game long enough to succeed.

Yet, despite how blatant these disparities are, the debate community rarely acknowledges them. The idea that debate is a pure meritocracy—that the best arguments will always win and that success is simply a result of effort—is one of the biggest myths perpetuated in this activity. Those who benefit from the existing structure are quick to dismiss the idea that access plays a role in competitive success. But anyone who has ever debated on an underfunded team, anyone who has ever watched their opponents come into a round with access to resources they could only dream of, knows the truth. Debate is not just about argumentation—it is about access. It is about opportunity. It is about whether a debater was lucky enough to be in a school or a region that invests in their success or whether they are forced to fight for every inch of progress they make on their own.

This divide isn’t just an inconvenience—it actively pushes talented debaters out of the activity. The reality is that many students who could have been incredible competitors never even get the chance to prove themselves. They don’t burn out because they lack passion or dedication; they burn out because the system wasn’t designed to support them. They spend years working twice as hard just to get half as far, and eventually, the weight of the imbalance becomes too much. It is one thing to lose a round because your opponent had a better argument—it is another to lose knowing that the outcome was never really in your control in the first place.

Yet, despite these challenges, many debaters refuse to be pushed out of the activity they love. Even without traditional coaching and the support of a school-funded team, they find ways to compete. They build their own networks, form independent debate groups, and turn to online resources to keep up with the circuit. They find creative ways to prepare, seeking out mentorship wherever they can and working together to level the playing field in an activity that was never designed to accommodate them. Instead of letting the system dictate their success, they redefine what it means to be a competitor.

For one partnership in Public Forum Debate, their school’s debate team was shut down due to unforeseeable administrative challenges in Summer 2024. Most of their team graduated that year, or left due to the logistical issues, leaving them on their own to prepare for and attend tournaments. While they had previously qualified for the  TOC Gold Division, that goal seemed significantly less attainable during their new season. Despite this new barrier, the team worked their way back from what could have been a devastating loss, and found ways to thrive on the national circuit. When speaking with them, they described a few challenges they faced, and how they overcame them, in hopes that debaters in similar situations could benefit:

First, not having teammates to prep with meant that there was a significant barrier to accessing the same amount of high quality prep as larger institutions. Planning effectively to produce their own evidence, whether this meant spending a weekend on it or cutting five cards each day, was critical to their success. Furthermore, they found that having a smaller body of high quality evidence was more effective than a larger body of poorer evidence. Consistently outputting work that they knew how to utilize well in debate rounds was of key importance to them.

Second, being part of a small team could be very insular at times; getting feedback and seeing different perspectives on how they debated was difficult, because they lacked coaches or knowledgeable teammates who could assist them. Attending camp over the summer, with the intent of also connecting with debaters that they could collaborate with over the course of the season was of critical importance. Outside of collaborating with peers, recording their rounds and rigorously redoing speeches helped them improve. Because many of the challenges they faced as a small school were structurally unavoidable, they doubled down on the parts of debate that they could still improve in. Being able to give “perfect speeches” that they were satisfied with helped counterbalance the struggles they already faced in the debate space. 

Finally, without a coach or administrators to manage the logistics of attending tournaments, the overhead of attending one could become rapidly overwhelming. It required lots of emailing Tabroom and spending time on fees, judging, hotels, and flights. Planning thoroughly, well in advance, was key; otherwise, leaving it up until the last minute could easily destroy their focus on debate and hinder their success.

While the barrier of lacking a team or coaches can create an uneven playing field, many debaters refuse to accept this as a barrier to competition. Despite the challenges that they face, they creatively find new ways to create their own success. But the question remains—why should they have to fight this hard just to be given a fair chance?