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My name is Anthony Trufanov—you can call me "Truf." This website has files, drills, and guides about policy debate and the current high school topic. Get championship-level resources and training to help you break into the national circuit—all for $5 a month.
Hello!
My name is Anthony Trufanov—you can call me "Truf." This website has files, drills, and guides about policy debate and the current high school topic. Get championship-level resources and training to help you break into the national circuit—all for $5 a month. Click the link in the bottom right corner to sign up.
Who Am I?
I coach policy debate at Dartmouth College, one of the most successful college debate teams in the country. I have coached teams from Dartmouth, Northwestern, and Kentucky to many national tournament wins. I also coach high school debate in the San Francisco Bay Area. I won the 2019 National Debate Tournament and Rex Copeland Award—the college policy debate equivalent of the Baker Award for strongest regular season performance. I won the 2015 NSDA National Championship in Policy Debate. I have been in debate for 11 years, and have been coaching for 7. As of the start of the '24/'25 season, I have written 68 affirmatives spanning 19 policy topics, and more neg files than I can count.
What Is This?
This project emerged from several premises:
- Access is low. Too much policy debate knowledge is locked within debate camps. Though they are educationally irreplaceable, their cost creates a huge barrier to access for teams hoping to break into the national circuit.
- Debate resources are expensive. Paid card-cutters are unaffordable to most self-financing teams. Policy chaperones often specialize in other forensics events or have competing responsibilities.
- Quality is inconsistent. Even among debaters who can go to camp, many have never seen a truly completed file. Existing files for sale are hit-or-miss.
- Small school debaters are overworked. They have an enormous amount on their plate. Lightening the burden of scraping the wiki for backfiles or preparing novice lesson plans means one less thing to worry about.
My goal is to expand access to high quality debate work, for the price of a coffee a month. This includes:
- Introductions, explainers, and strategy guides about the current policy debate topic, based on extensive topic research.
- Topic CPs, DAs, Ks, T arguments, and affirmatives—written by me—that can defeat any team on the circuit in the right hands, as well as notes and drills to hone your execution.
- Backfiles—written by me—to quickly catch up on the basics so that you can focus on improving your skills and innovating your strategies.
- Articles providing in-depth explanations of debate theory and competition concepts, as well as drills and files to practice deploying those concepts in debates.
This website will not attempt to replace all your research. Instead, it will provide a strong foundation for core arguments, along with guidance for how to build on them so that you feel prepared for any debate.
Usage Guidelines
I have put a significant amount of work into this resource, and would respectfully ask that you follow my guidelines for its use. If you are a subscriber, feel free to:
- Use these files in debates
- Share these files with your debate partner
- Open source any evidence that you read in a debate using https://opencaselist.com/
- Point others to this resource if you, yourself, have found it helpful
Please do NOT share the contents of this site with anyone other than your debate partner - whether at your school or camp. Piracy will make this resource non-viable for me to sustain. If I become aware of use that violates these guidelines, your access may be revoked.
Please Reach Out If:
- You feel that you would benefit from this resource but it is financially inaccessible to you.
- You are a school or a camp that would like to use this resource as a teaching aid, or would like to purchase file access for your debaters.
I will be happy to help with a solution that works for your needs. You can reach me at ant981228 (at) gmail (dot) com.
Thanks for reading, and click the "Sign Up" button in the bottom right corner if you'd like to see more!