Dear NCFCA Affiliates and Friends,
A fundamental precept of both policy and value debate is the fact that good ideas often clash, and this principle holds far beyond debate rounds. Organizations and individuals must continually weigh comparative advantages between alternate courses of action and choose what to value when two desirable values clash. As I noted at Nationals, we have been looking at the viability of Moot Court as a part of our forensics offerings for several years. We’ve discussed the issues with multiple stakeholder groups and debated the advantages and disadvantages of continuing the program that we value, but which imposes a significant management concern for the organization. As a result of these conversations, we have made the difficult decision to place a pause on our Moot Court program after the 2024-2025 season. It has become clear that the magnitude of specialized resources Moot Court requires outweighs the practicality for us to continue to offer it as a regular competitive event at this time.
We recognize that Moot Court offers a challenging educational experience that our students have both stepped up to and risen above. Countless legal professionals who have judged our events have commented on the outstanding ability of our students. Our evaluation and ultimate decision to not offer this event have nothing to do with the capacity, performance, or skill acquisition of our students. If anything, this perspective is what has prompted several years of discussion while we actively sought to find a way to make the organizational workload and preparation workable so that we could continue. The bottom line is that we have not solved the challenge of making this event manageable within our current framework. Though we’ve been blessed with literally hundreds of selfless contributors who have poured in to make this event happen successfully over the years, each year our staff is faced with two main issues: (1) the creation or acquisition of a mission-aligned case packet and (2) obstacles that disproportionately drain our operational resources.
Quite simply, Moot Court is unique in a number of ways from our other events.
As most of you know, the case for the packet is fiction, but the support packet itself is actual legal case precedent. We can and have tailored our case content to our students, but the amendment issues that are interesting and relevant for our students are often inherently fraught with explicit content. While students eligible for Moot are slightly older, they are still in high school, and the missional objectives of the league demand that we consider the content we put before our young people. Unlike the self-directed research for our other styles of debate, Moot Court assigns a “closed universe” of material that we provide and successful competitors must read and study the whole packet.
The American Moot Court Association (AMCA) has been very generous over the years to grant us permission to consider use of their cases. While we were able to tweak their packets in several seasons, a number of their case problems are off the table for us. While vitally important, we believe topics like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights are not broadly appropriate for our target audiences. This leaves us in the position of needing to come up with a packet of our own.
In the best of situations, writing and reviewing an excellent case packet requires a team of individuals with specific legal or Moot Court skills to donate literally hundreds of volunteer hours mixed into their already busy calendars. Asking them to also align the content of the packet with our mission is yet another significant hurdle. The generosity and expertise of the alumni, current parents, sponsors, and other passionate volunteers who have contributed to packets over the years is appreciated beyond what words can convey. We recognize what a big ask it has been! Unfortunately, the necessary months of work and collaboration that are outside of our leadership team’s control lead to significant unpredictability for the league. This puts an inordinate amount of pressure on our staff and conflicts with our commitment to enduring excellence for our entire slate of competitive events.
In addition to the challenge of creating new cases, Moot Court operates differently from our other debate styles. While Moot is similar in many ways to value and policy, it is just different enough to not “fit” in normal protocols and processes of judge recruitment, tournament administration, and calendaring. In terms of judge recruitment, our commitment has been to have judges who can offer our students feedback based on nuanced legal argumentation. This is different from NCFCA’s long standing judge philosophy, which values a diverse judge pool from all walks of life in order to encourage students to be effective public-square communicators. Naturally, having two philosophies requires either additional volunteer recruiters or additional work for the volunteers who are recruiting for our other tournaments. Moot is also challenging to navigate from a compliance perspective. While our students work hard to be academically accurate, questions do arise, and we are forced to rely on outside experts who can answer the legal questions and then try to fit that into our normal adjudication process. This often creates delays in the tournament that are not foreseeable and frustrations for professionals who are taking time out of their work day to serve as judges. Finally, Moot intensifies the difficulties we face in setting our regional competition calendars. Since we have determined that Moot rounds don’t fit well with our other tournament structure, we must fit in another entire set of tournaments that cut across all regional boundaries. This creates additional hurdles for volunteer Regional Directors who diligently minimize schedule conflicts in order to provide equitable participation opportunities for all students within a given region.
At the end of the day, pausing Moot Court is not the decision any of us really wanted to make. Personally, it’s the decision I’ve wrestled with for the last five years. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Moot has been an amazing opportunity for hundreds of students in the league over the last eight seasons. Unfortunately, I’ve also had a front row seat to the impact on the workload as well as the downstream effect it has had on our key volunteers and staff who serve so diligently. Along with our Board of Directors, I’ve had to take a hard look at what, and how much, we are asking people to do. We have determined that the answer, especially over the last few years, has been “too much.” As a result, we’ve recommitted ourselves to becoming relentless stewards of the resources the Lord has given us. We believe this will allow us to focus all of our energy on the things for which we are specifically called and equipped. Our value of Enduring Excellence taken from Colossians 3:23-24 reminds us that keeping focus on the real purpose of work – to glorify Christ – leads to the right, sustainable order of things. We will continue to strive to model that purpose in both word and deed even when it’s hard
Yours in Christ,
Kim Cromer
Executive Director, NCFCA
Answers to Anticipated Questions
- Why announce this now? So families have an opportunity to consider participation for this season.
- Will NCFCA reconsider if enough people want to participate? No. This was not a decision that was based on participation numbers. While the bottom line is that meeting our mission depends on students participating and that having more participation can allow us more resources, the decision to discontinue the event was based on the reasoning presented.
- Is this forever? Not necessarily. We do not discount that the Lord could provide a pathway that we don’t currently have.
- Can my student who is 14 participate this season? The committee will make exceptions for students who are one year from standard eligibility. Families will be strongly cautioned about the volume of information/demand of the event as well as the explicit content found in this season’s packet. Please contact the Moot court Committee as soon as possible to arrange for this option.
- What could “we” have done to help out to not have it reach this point? Probably very little except perhaps recruit more judges. The quality and number of volunteers we have had on the prep end has been more than sufficient. They’ve all been rock stars! More people involved in the case writing process would mean even more coordination than already required. We know this often leads to just more time needed to accomplish the task. Our judge recruiters have been amazing! They work so hard to ensure we have what we need, but they are limited by the number of busy professionals who will respond positively to our ask!
