Parent Judging Info

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 come to the Espresso Cup tournament. Part of this effort is to have 3 judges in every speech room in every round as well as adequate judges throughout the preliminary and outrounds 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 Espresso Cup or you must have another adult who can feasibly fulfill all of your judging responsibilities.

2. Parent judging requirements:

We understand that for larger families with multiple students participating, the system may generate an unachievable number of rounds for you to judge. If this is your situation, we ask that you judge a minimum of 7 rounds for the tournament. Otherwise, please sign up for the number of judging slots that the registration requires.

3. Recruit Community Judges!

We have a generous judge recruitment contest with the top prize $100 cash. Even with parents judging, we do not have enough to cover all the judging slots for every round to give the competitors 3 judges/round for speech. And more is needed for outrounds for both Speech and Debate on Saturday. Ask a Friend, co-worker, family members to come and judge!

4. Parent Sign up and Check-In:

  • A Parli Parent/Chaperone will be REQUIRED to participate in a check-in process that will be simultaneous to the student check-in. If the student does not have an adult able to judge rounds, they may not compete.
  • At many Stoa tournaments, parents are not held accountable for their specific time slots, but that will not be the case that Espresso Cup. We will be depending on you to come to Ballot Push at least 30 minutes before each of your selected judging times. In order to meet the needs of the tournament, you may also be asked to judge during different rounds in order to keep the tournament running on time.

5. Younger siblings must be supervised at all times.

6. We Appreciate You!

We appreciate all parent judges and value your time and participation. For this reason, not only will we be grateful for the time you spend judging, but we will also be rewarding those parents who judge at our tournament. We will be giving out 2 raffle prizes/day to the judges. For every round you judge, you will receive a raffle ticket for one of the prizes. We will share details regarding the parent judging contest at Ballot Distribution!

6. Our Pledge 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. Last year, we recruited around 100 community judges, but we were 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!