Note: if you have questions you’d like us to ask, you can submit them here, and we’ll ask them during the next set of tourney interviews! Greenhill SK and her coaches were unavailable for interviews.

Finalist Interviews

Question: You pushed through the tournament without losing a ballot until semifinals. How’s it feel to perform so well? And how was the overall tournament experience?
Whit Jackson: The tournament experience was really exciting. Not only did Mr. Alderete run a fantastically well-run and on-time tournament, but I felt like a lot of the work we had put into preparation and drilling prior to the tournament paid off really well.

Q: How did prep leading into Meadows, the last tourney of the topic, differ from the start of the topic? Did the NovDec topic release impact your prep at all?
WJ: In terms of aff strategy, I decided to read the same case and plan text from my first round at Loyola to sems of Meadows, so what became really important and what we focused on leading up to it was making sure I was fully prepared for all the positions people had been reading against it. For example we had lost a few rounds to the security K at loyola and greenhill, but we rehauled our frontlines to it which helped in one of my elims rounds. For the neg, we based our prep heavily off of the matchups we expected in elims. Because the majority of the pool were running military affs, we focused mainly on prepping those out with generics like the race k and readiness DA. Also, I’m not debating NovDec, so it was nice to focus on SeptOct, where in past years I’ve had to split my attention

Q: No NovDec? When will we next see you?
WJ: Most likely CPS once most of my college apps are in. I decided to take the next topic off so I could focus on apps and work on some of our non-topic specific prep and generics.

Q: Back to Meadows, what did your pre-round prep look like leading into finals?
WJ: Before the tournament Varad and I had dedicated about 5ish hours to perfecting a new version of T – Military and drilling the 2NR based on the responses Greenhill had been reading against it, so that was always the plan for the 2NR. However, once they broke the aff that was read in finals, we decided to go for an unconventional case strategy mostly around impact turning the aff’s warming impact, so a lot of our prep after pairings came out was making sure I could explain the turns well.

Q: Did any part of finals particularly stick out or catch you off-guard?
WJ: One of the trickiest parts of the round was in the 1AC CX when I found out the aff didn’t defend a decrease in warming, which made what was supposed to be 2-3 minutes of the NC (the impact turns) irrelevant. And we hadn’t cut many other case answers. I opted to add a disad to the NC and try to find ways to spin the impacts as still applying.

Thanks so much to Whit for sharing his perspective with the community! If you appreciate these interviews, please leave us some feedback (either in this survey or in the comments below).