On the weekend of April 18-19, Classrooms.Cloud hosted the University of Kentucky’s Tournament of Champions, a prestigious end of the year national championship that featured nearly 1,100 competitors and 500 judges and coaches from 300 schools in 37 states and 4 countries.
1,147 rounds of debate in one classroom per debate, more than 10,000 speeches, and more than 52,000 minutes of speaking across the four-day competition that crowned twelve speaking and debating champions in different events.
The University of Kentucky Debate Team staff organized the competition as they normally would, with Classrooms.Cloud providing the infrastructure to organize the Zoom conference rooms, maintaining a security overlay on top of the Zoom system, monitoring and managing room usage, providing necessary coding changes, enabling YouTube posting of elimination rounds, and providing general technical consultation, support, and technical resolution that allowed the Kentucky debate program to focus on running the event instead of the electronic infrastructure.
Lincoln Garrett, Head Coach of the UK Debate team, explained, “Classrooms.Cloud organized and sustained the electronic infrastructure that made this tournament possible and did it in a safe and secure way. Simply, they took the tech side of the event off our shoulders and made it possible to focus on what we do best.”
The participants reported a very positive experience with the event, with many commenting that it is a “proof of concept” for organizing online debate tournaments in the future. Lincoln noted, “Based on our experience with Classrooms.Cloud, we know the debate community will be able to run tournaments that meet the standards of the Tournament of Champions with their support.”