Tabroom exploded: Owasso’s Debate Tournament

By Olivia Kerber

Picture of Owasso debate team members taken by Ms. Dodge

This year, Owasso High School’s Speech and Debate team hosted their annual Owasso Invitational Debate tournament, with over six hundred entries from other schools to compete. Despite this large competition, things ran smoothly— until they didn’t. 

For those who aren’t a part of this program, you may have never heard of “Tabroom.” Tabroom is a website that manages Debate tournaments nationwide. Tournament entries get their next round’s opponents and room numbers where they will debate posted on the website and emailed to them from Tabroom. At tournaments, there is a room that those hosting will also call Tabroom, and it is where a select few of other schools’ coaches who are experienced in the debate world sit and “Tab” competitors’ wins and losses into the website. This is how the website places people in tournaments. Simply, Tabroom is the main component of determining where people debate and who wins these tournaments. 

So, how could this have gone wrong?

“Tabroom exploded,” says Ms. Dodge, Owasso’s Speech and Debate coach.

Despite Dodge herself not being in Tabroom when the website shut down nationwide due to an overload of tournaments, there was one Owasso student who was— Ava Burnett. 

Burnett states, “I was designated by [Dodge] to be in Tabroom with some other coaches so I could help things run smoothly with debate ballots coming through. When we found out Tabroom had gone down, nobody knew why or how long it would be down for.”

This put a huge halt to the tournament since nobody could get assignments to where they needed to debate, and judges couldn’t get where they were supposed to judge. 

Plainly, “We didn’t know if we would have to completely cancel the tournament or not,” Dodge expressed.

Through some discussions with those in Tabroom about what the best course of action was, the decision was made to cancel the tournament for those in the “Champs” and “Novice” Divisions and to run the rest of the tournament on paper for those in the 6A and 5A divisions. This is because those in Champs and Novice don’t qualify for regionals if they win, while those in 6A and 5A do. 

“The most urgent thing was getting kids qualified, not just giving them a medal.” Burnett asserts. 

“So, after a little bit of waiting with [Tabroom] still not coming back on, we sent McCraken (Booker T. Washington debate coach) to tell everyone waiting in the cafeteria that Tabroom had shut down and that the tournament was paused.” 

Not everyone was very happy about this news.

Burnett recalls, “Even though it wasn’t our fault that Tabroom shut down, some [coaches] were still upset with us for canceling Novice and Champs since they paid an entry fee. It just is unfair to everyone involved that the website shut down.” 

Despite a two-hour delay in the middle of the ongoing tournament, Owasso’s Debate team still managed to get debaters placed and qualified.