OMG!! Ok, so yesterday was my very first debate tournament. And me and my partner were freaking out about our rounds, we didn't really know what to expect. It turned out that we knew more than the other novice teams that we went up against. So, our first round was interesting. First of all, all of the rounds were flighted, meaning that there would be four teams competing in the same room, first two teams, and then the second two teams. So, there were two pages with two columns each with maybe six or seven rooms to a column each with four teams per room in each round. (If that's confusing, sorry. It makes sense when you see it..) Anyways, so our first round, my partner and I were second flight, and the judge was late for the first one which made everything late, also making me and my partner late for our next round. In our first round, we went up against a pair of very nice girls who had great points, but couldn't really back them up, and couldn't really answer our questions in cross-fire. They aparently later talked to the next pair of girls we went up against and told them we were really smart...pfft, it was a logical debate, not neccessarily the "smart" debate. Anyways, in our second round we went up against another pair of girls, the second pair I just mentioned. This round was the round we were late to, and we were supposed to be the first flight in the round, but since our first round didn't get out until 15 minutes after the second round started, we ended up being the second flight. When we actually started our round, the girls we were up against didn't attack our points at all, and when they did, they hit one point in two speeches (which is basically like not touching on them at all) so anytime me or my partner would get up to speak to cover our points we'd basically just have to say that our opponents hadn't attacked our points, therefore they still stood, and then move on to attacking theirs. Our third round judge never showed up, and the round before us hadn't gotten out when we were supposed to be in round, so we ended up getting to know our opponents (sort of...they were pompous jerks in my opinion). The judges from the last round that had been in the room we were supposed to be in ended up running back to see if we were still there and judged our round. She was freaking funny. Goodness. Anyways, that was a really bad round. The other team had six points, and a bunch of them were really off the wall, they were so hard to attack because they were so crazy, and there were six of them, so we had nine points all together that we would have to hit in our speaking time. And like the team before them, they didn't outright attack our points, they would only ask questions about them in crossfire. They ended up asking questions that we couldn't answer. Uggh, it was such a pain. And we ended up placing!! We placed 6th! I still can't believe it. When they called our names, we turned and looked at each other and our jaws dropped. Then we were super-excited. We went up and we were both just expecting a 6th place ribbon like other people had gotten, but no. We got TROPHIES. Exciting? I thought so. Then today me and Kayla got our ballots back, and found out that we'd won our first two rounds, and I found out that in our first two rounds (the four speakers in each round are ranked from 1-4) I had been ranked the number 1 speaker in the round, and for me that was BIG. I was so paranoid, especially since when we'd run a practice round in afterschools my brain wouldn't connect with my mouth when I was supposed to be giving my speech. And even though we lost the last round, I was ranked higher than my partner. And she's cool, I freaking love my partner, we work really well together. AAAH! So exciting!!!