Dear PSCFA Community,

The 2025- 2026 season is coming to a close. On behalf of PSCFA I would like to invite you and your teams to the 2025 Cool-Off Tournament held at Cypress College, April 25th- 26th.

A unique aspect of the Cool-Off is that it is for novices and rookies only. This allows for students with little or no competition experience to compete with students of their level.

This is also a great opportunity for coaches to take a break and give junior and senior competitors a chance to be on the other side of the ballot and judge a few rounds. Those junior and senior students that do judge will not sacrifice any competitive eligibility for later seasons since this is a novice only event. Remember, all judges must be certified for PSCFA tournaments so please have them go to the PSCFA website, read the Forensics Related Educational Document (F.R.E.D.), and certify online https://forensics.protocommunications.com/courses/fred-certification-course/

Key points:

●  Registration is due Tuesday, April 22th by 6:00 pm PST on forensicstournament.net. 

●  This tournament will be held in person at Cypress College.

●  We will still be using eballots so all judges will need a device that allows them to access eballoting. Please, make sure that judge’s emails are verified in the system.

●  Judges should accept ballots as soon as they are notified.

●  IF ballots are not picked up 10 minutes prior to the round, your ballot may be pushed and you will be charged a nuisance fee.

●  Judges are encouraged to submit ballots ASAP after the round. Additional comments can be added to the ballots any time before the end of the tournament.

●  Drops after the Wednesday deadline do not alter a school’s judging commitment.

●  The Tournament Director solicits submissions of Debate topics prior to Friday, April 18th. Please send them to jbruetsch@sdsu.edu to be forwarded to the topic committee.

●  Each school is required to provide one judge for every 4 IE entries per pattern/2 debate teams. Uncovered entries will not be permitted. Please see HiredJudge.com if you need to arrange for judges.

●  The Coaches Meeting will be held at 1:00 pm on Saturday, April 25th room TBA.

●  We will offer four (4) rounds of Novice and Rookie NFA-LD, NPDA and IPDA debate on Saturday. Sunday will offer the usual two (2) rounds of all PSCFA individual events for Novice competitors.

Attached, please find more detailed tournament information, a description of tournament rules, and procedures and entry forms. Please refer to the PSCFA Handbook for the newest information on Rules, available at www.pscfa.org. 

We look forward to seeing you at The Cool-Off! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Tournament Director, Mikayla Holzinger, University of La Verne.

mholzinger@laverne.edu