TOC Finals – Rex Interview, Speech Docs, & Flow
Interview with Santa Monica RE (Rex Evans)
Congratulations and thank you to Rex Evans, 2018 TOC finalist, for providing some insight into his TOC experience!
Q: How does it feel to be the first sophomore in modern LD debate (and maybe ever!) to reach finals of the TOC? How did you reach elite levels of competition so rapidly, did middle school debate help, and what advice would you give to freshmen/sophomores for making the jump to top circuit competition?
A: It still hasn’t really sunk in, but it feels amazing. Going into TOC I was hoping maybe to get to quarters and never would’ve imagined getting all the way to finals. The two major things I did that I would recommend for younger debaters is drilling and watching rounds. While cutting cards is important, I feel it’s more important to be able to actually execute your prep. I also want to give a shoutout to all of my coaches–I would not have come close to having as much success as I have had without all of their help. I actually did public forum in middle school which was vastly different. Some of the skills I learned from PF might have indirectly helped, but I was pretty much completely new to the activity going into freshman year.
Q: How was TOC different than other circuit tournaments for you? Did you notice a different atmosphere, different arguments, or different judging?
A: It honestly felt like any other tournament. Besides the fact that people were a little more competitive and it was many seniors’ last tournament, I treated it like a normal tournament and didn’t feel too different.
Q: What did your typical day or week of prep look like over the past two months after the regular season ended? What does it take to prepare for TOC?
A: I tried to have at least three practice debates a week the weeks leading up to TOC. I also spent at least three hours a week drilling with coaches and all the remaining time I spent either going through our prep to make sure I understood how to execute everything or cutting updates and writing frontlines. I think it’s more important to refine the prep you already have than to spend a bunch of time cutting thirty new affs and trying to have answers to every possible new aff people could break. I spent most of my time drilling generics like the states counterplan and politics, topicality, and generic kritiks that applied to any aff.
Q: You showed tremendous argument flexibility this season with affs ranging from Pettit republicanism to Kant and Rousseau to habeas viscus and a death penalty plan. What was the argument strategy going into TOC: Were you expecting to read arguments across the spectrum, or did you prep and pref judges for one style more than others?
A: My main aff was Kant death penalty. I liked it for a few reasons. I’d been reading it for a while and was very familiar with the different nuances and generally understood it really well, and it also gave me strategic flexibility in that I could go either for the fw or a concede util and go for the offense because it was multi-functional. Our other affs were mainly small scale consequentialism plans such as the police aff, environmental crimes, and the sterilization aff (which I didn’t end up breaking, but Eric did). The judge pool was very diverse in argumentation styles and geographic region (the two kind of go hand-in-hand), so we made sure I was ready to go on generic ks like habeas viscus as well as technical theory debates so I would be comfortable regardless of who was in the back of the room.
Q: Talk about the final round. Why did you read the police aff? What were you expecting from Greenhill, did you try anything new in dealing with afropessimism, and how will your strategy against it change moving forward?>
A: Our thinking was that it had a solid material impact (police brutality) to leverage against kritiks of state action like afropessimism. We were expecting either 1 off afropess (which ended up happening) or a multi layered strategy centered around anti-blackness such as what they read vs Whit [in semis]. I’d prepped and drilled a lot of my afropess 1AR during the weekend with Amit and Raffi and had spent some time retooling and understanding the argument more in depth the past couple weeks. While obviously the result wasn’t what we hoped, I think the 1AR will probably stay pretty similar and I’ll drill more on it to better execute it in the future.
