Dear Ex Nihilo Team –
The Beacon on the Bay Tournament began registration yesterday. Visit https://bbay.homeschooldebate.net/. This is a one-day speech-only tournament making it convenient to attend. Located in San Pedro next to Long Beach, it is reasonably local. If you have an interest in speech tournaments, you are encouraged to register and attend. REGISTER SOONER RATHER THAN LATER! Tournaments fill up. Especially if you would be participating in only one or two events, it would be a shame to end up on the waiting list for those events because you delayed registering.
This Friday registration opens for the Desert Gem, which will feature speech and debate. This is in Palm Desert, and will last three days, Jan 23-25th. This is becoming a larger tournament and will offer good competition for those of you aspiring to perfect your skills. The link is https://thedesertgem2020.homeschooldebate.net/.
It is important that each family keep track of what tournaments you plan to attend using the tournament calendar on the Stoa website. Go to https://stoausa.org/tournament-calendar/.
In addition, open the link for each of the tournaments you plan to attend and note the DATE REGISTRATION OPENS! This is generally several weeks in advance of the actual tournament dates.
It is always best, particularly for tournaments like Point Loma, ICC, and Concordia, to register in the first half of the first day of open registration to ensure getting into all the events you want to compete in, whether debate or speech events. For any of these tournaments there will be competitors from all over California, as well as Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Washington, as well as from some other states, thus making available slots for a particular event hard to get if you delay registering. Finally, registration always closes weeks in advance of a tournament date because the tabulation team has to prepare all of the registration data for the day of competition, and that takes them time (they are all volunteers and have to squeeze this responsibility in around the other responsibilities of life).
Potential tournaments near at hand (there are many, many more if you like to travel – check your Stoa calendar https://stoausa.org/tournament-calendar/):
We will be sending out a separate list of tournaments for this season and their registration dates soon of events commonly attended by San Diegans. It will not have everything available in all of California, let alone other states, but will serve as a starting guide. In the meantime, check the Stoa calendar!
Sincerely,
Ex Nihilo Coaching Staff