2025 Centennial State Tournament

If you have participated in a Speech and Debate tournament before, then you are aware of the importance of parent judges. It is our goal to provide a quality tournament to all of the families who prepare for, practice, pay for and travel to CST. Part of this effort is to have 3 judges in every speech room in every round as well as adequate judges throughout the rounds of debate. This will require EVERYONE'S participation. In order to achieve this goal, we have set up the following guidelines for ALL parent judges:

1. Parent/Adult Judge Presence Required at Tournament:

Every student must have a participating parent/adult judge present at the tournament. While we understand that it is sometimes more convenient or cost effective for families to send their students to tournaments with other families, this puts a severe strain on the availability of parent judges. For this reason, you must either be present with your student at CST, or you must have another adult who can feasibly fulfill all of your judging responsibilities.

2. Parent judging requirements:

All IE Competitors are required to provide a judge for a minimum of two rounds for every IE event for which they are registered. For example, if you register for three IE events, then you are required to provide judges for a minimum of six rounds.

All TP/LD Debate Competitors are required to provide a judge for three rounds.

All Parliamentary Debate Competitors are required to provide a judge for two rounds.

*To determine the total number of rounds required for a student or family, all the speech and debate judge requirements are added together.  However, we will observe the following caps on judging slots per family:*

* For 1-2 students competing in a family the maximum judge slots will be *15.*
* For 3 or more students competing in a family the maximum judge slots will be *20.*

3. Parent Check-In and Judging:

Parents will be REQUIRED to participate in a check-in process that will be simultaneous to the student check-in. We will also be depending on you to come to Ballot Push at least 30 minutes before each and every round to check and see if we need you to judge.

4. Our committment to you: 

Even though fulfilling judging requirements is essential to providing a quality tournament, we do understand that this commitment can be demanding and exhausting. For this reason, we pledge to you that we will do our best to recruit as many community judges as possible in the weeks leading up to the tournament. We often recruit a large number of community judges, but we are sometimes still not able to fulfill the goal of 3 judges in every speech round due to lack of parent judges. We are committed to recruiting as many community judges as possible, but we also need YOU to fulfill your judging minimum.

Thank you for working with us to make this a quality tournament for everyone!