event
Aug 25, 2024
Winter holidays open 2022 - online
event
Dec 16, 2022 - Dec 22, 2022
Dear members of the international debate community,
Croatian Debate Society would like to invite you to Winter Holidays Open, our yearly international World Schools tournament for high school students. WHO 2022 is going to take place from 16th to 21st of December 2022. This year we have the honour to host the 10th edition of WHO. We are grateful to all of you for your support and company so far and we hope to once again deliver a fun, competitive and well-run tournament.
We welcome around 90 teams each year, with debaters and adjudicators from 36 nations – Australia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, China, Denmark, Finland,Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Sweden, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, UAE, Vietnam and the USA joining us so far.
It is not lost on us that many of these nations were only able to join us in 2020 and 2021 online editions.
Even though we miss seeing everyone in person, we have decided that the right way forward is to make Winter Holidays Open an online event for the third year in a row. We hope to make the tournament as accessible as possible to everyone and we hope that our two-division schedule will accommodate participants from many different time zones.
The tournament features six power-paired (save for Round 1 which is seeded randomly) preliminary rounds followed by five elimination rounds, starting with partial-double octofinals and culminating in the Grand Final.
For the preliminary rounds, all teams will be divided into two divisions to accommodate for the range of time zones WHO debaters come from. With this year’s schedule, we plan to hold two preliminary rounds per day, allowing for a more relaxed tempo. This also means that we are able to have three prepared and three impromptu rounds, as opposed to previous years which featured four prep and two impro rounds. Rounds 1, 3 and 5 are going to be prepared. Teams are going to debate on the first prepared motion in Round 1 with randomly assigned sides on the day of the round. The second prepared motion is going to be debated in rounds 3 and 5 which are going to be side-locked, which means that all teams will debate both on proposition and opposition.
