Dear coaches,

 

We are pleased to welcome you and your students to the new season of DSG Senior League (SL)!

This email contains information regarding the first four rounds, including the draw and prepared motions, judges' briefing, and other related issues. 

 

Attached to this message you may find the draw for the preliminary rounds, which are scheduled to take place on Fri, 4th Dec 2026 (rounds 1&2) and Sat, 30th Jan 2027 (rounds 3&4). We are immensely grateful to all schools who kindly offered to host one or both of those meets! As always, we have tried our best to minimise travel distance for all parties as far as possible in preparing the draw. We thus ask for your understanding that we will not revise the draw at this stage to address any individual schools' concerns about the venues they are assigned to. The host schools will receive a separate information package as the debate day approaches.

Also enclosed with the draw are the prepared motions for rounds 2 and 4. They are:

Round 2: This house opposes algorithmic user-tailoring of content feeds (as practiced by e.g. TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, Netflix)

Round 4: This house believes that Canada should become part of the European Union

 

As you may have noticed, this year we have two schools from the middle and north of Germany (Berlin and Kiel) participating in SL. As it will be impractical for these teams to travel to Baden-Württemberg or Hesse for the first four rounds, our draw for this season includes an online venue. Debates at the online venue will happen remotely via Microsoft Teams videocalls. For each of the two days, we also needed two other schools to participate in those online debates. Those schools were selected randomly from the pool of all participating schools who were not selected to host on that day. We realise that having to debate online may be a disappointment for many debaters, but unfortunately the geographic distribution of participating schools left us with no better option.

Please note that all students participating in the online debates will have to submit a data protection form signed by their legal guardian (for minors) or by themselves (for legal adults) ahead of the debate. More information on this will be sent to the affected schools separately.

For the debate weekend (rounds 5-8) and the final rounds, remote participation will not be possible and we invite all qualifying teams to attend those events in person.

 

Like every year, we want to remind you that SL is only possible if we have enough judges available for every debate. Therefore, each participating team is required by the SL rules to provide at least one judge in every round they participate in. This can, but does not necessarily have to be, the team's main coach (see the attached rulebook for exact rules regarding eligibility). If you already know that you will not be able to accompany your team to one or multiple of the rounds this season, please arrange for a substitute judge in advance!

All prospective judges regardless of previous experience are also required (if at all possible) to attend the season's judges' briefing, which will be held via MS Teams on Thu, 26 Nov 2026, at 7pm. The briefing is expected to take about 60 to 90 minutes and a video recording and written notes will be circulated afterwards. If you are unable to attend, please plan some time to review the recording and the notes before you judge your first debate of the season.

 

This season's SL debate weekend will take place at the DJH youth hostel in Mannheim on Fri-Sun, 5th-7th March 2027. Due to payment deadlines set by the hostel, we will once again employ a two-stage registration process this year. You will receive more detailed information on this separately later this year, and stage 1 registration will begin in December.

 

Please do not hesitate to contact us at sl@schoolsdebate if you have any further concerns and/or questions.

We are looking forward to this new season of SL with you!

 

Best wishes,

Sunny, Caroline, Leander, Alex, Atharv, and Kavin