American Parliamentary Debate Association - Organizational Structure

Organizational Structure

APDA comprises about 50 universities, mainly in the Northeast, ranging as far north as Maine and as far south as Florida. Most of its members are private colleges, though several public universities also compete.

APDA members stage weekly debating tournaments, each at a different university and occurring throughout the academic year. Some weekends have two debating tournaments, one north of New York City and one south of New York City, in order to shorten transport time. However, centrally located tournaments or particularly prestigious tournaments, such as those at Columbia, Boston University, and Harvard will be “unopposed”, meaning that they will be the only tournament on that particular weekend. While APDA does play a role in creating a tournament schedule, the tournaments themselves are only loosely coordinated by the APDA body. Individual schools must ensure that their tournaments meet a broad set of APDA guidelines, but are free to tinker with their tournament formats.

There are a number of tournaments in which APDA does play a direct role. Most prominently, APDA sponsors a National Championship at the end of each year. Unlike all other tournaments, debating at Nationals is limited to one team per university, plus any additional teams who “qualified” for Nationals during that debate season. There are several ways to qualify for Nationals, but by far the most common through the 2006-2007 season was to reach the final round of a tournament. Starting with the 2007-2008 season, qualification was earned through year-long performance, gauged by advancing to quarterfinals or further at tournaments of sufficient size.

In addition, APDA sponsors a novice tournament at the beginning of the season, a pro-am tournament midseason, and the North American Debating Championships, which are held every other year in the United States and include top teams from the United States and Canada.

APDA also has a ranking system which combines the results of all of the year’s tournaments. Both individual speakers and two-member teams can earn points based on the results of the tournament; these points also scale up depending on the tournament’s size. At the end of the debate season, APDA gives awards to the top ten teams, speakers, and novices of the year.

APDA is an entirely student-run organization. The APDA board members are students from various host institutions, and most of the tournaments are completely organized by the host school’s debate team. Some teams do have professional coaches, but these are frequently recently retired debaters who wish to stay involved with the circuit.