Written by Mike Weltevrede
The Maastricht Open is a semi special tournament to me. It has given me a mixture of positive and negative experiences in a weird combination. In the first year that I went, it provided me with my first judge break. However, I had left before the break because I thought “there was no way I’d break anyway”. In the second year, Nikolai and I were doing well and drew OG on a motion discussing the special ties that the US has had with Syria. I thought that was fine, because we seemed to know a bit about the subject and OG is my favourite position anyway. Nearing the end of prep, the door opened, and the other teams walked in. It might be safe to say that we were not necessarily the most confident after they entered, because those other teams consisted of Lennart van Laake and Nina Ramaswamy, Jeroen Wijnen and Romée Lind, and Roel Becker and Ben Shaw. Nonetheless, we still gave good speeches and spent way too much time on Roel’s POI, asking Nikolai “what the Vatican would think of this policy”. In the third year, namely last year, the legendary “Highest, lowest”-meme was born. I spoke one of my best tournaments up to that point, speaking a 77,8 average if you do not count round 3. However, in round 3 I choked and spoke a 66. That brings me to this edition of the Maastricht Open, having taken place on the 21st and 22nd of April.
I left Tilburg on Friday the 20th of April to head to one of my favourite tournaments. I was teaming up with the ever-amazing Steven Glen (lots of love!) under the team name ‘Too bad Mr Peanut Butter’. However, that team name was not going to last long. At reg, we decided to change our team name to ‘Waking up at 5:30 am in Belgium’. Let’s give some context to that team name.
So, I arrived at the pre-reg location (the StayOkay next to the Maas) to meet up with our crash host. It was a nice location with a pretty cool view. We were informed in advance that our crash location was a bit out there and that we would have to cycle there. Little did we know, however, that we would be travelling to the faraway land of Belgium (okay, you could have predicted that). After Steven’s mum had driven us there, we first had to wait for the third person (a guy named Johannes) crashing there to arrive. So, Steven and I passed the time with a bit of Mario Kart on my Nintendo Switch (buy one, it’s great :D). After Johannes arrived, we quite quickly went to sleep, as we did have to get up at around 7:15 the next morning. This brings me to the other part of our team name: Johannes forgot to turn of his alarm for the previous night. Apparently, he is a police officer or so and he must get up early. As such, his alarm started blaring at 5:30 am, waking me from my lovely dream (I don’t remember what it was about, but I am sure that it was pretty good). Yuck.
This was the tale of our team name, I hope you enjoyed it and that it inspires you on your quest for a team name for the next tournament.
PS: The tournament itself was cool too, props to the orgcom, the volunteers, and the CA team. I had a stellar time!
De Nederlandse Debatbond (NDB) stelt zich als doel het wedstrijddebat te bevorderen en ondersteunen in Nederland. Als nationaal overkoepelend orgaan vertegenwoordigt de NDB ongeveer 1.000 leden waarvan de meesten lid zijn van één van de debatverenigingen die Nederland rijk is.
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