The work, week by week.
A Break season runs on six services. Each is named below, with three walkthroughs of the app where the work is scheduled, documented, and shown to the family.
What a Break week looks like
Two services set the cadence. Drills land hour by hour on the calendar; reading groups land once a week in a room of four.
Drills
Drills are the deep work between tournaments. Each one is booked through the Break App, hour by hour: one on one with an experienced coach of their choice, calibrated to the debater’s argument style and the work in front of them. Sessions are recorded, summarized, and saved to the account so the next coach picks up where the last one left off.
Reading groups
Reading groups run on a curriculum. Four students gather once a week over Zoom around a passage the coach has assigned the week before: ten to twenty pages of continental philosophy, critical theory, or the academic work that sits underneath the active resolution. The coach arrives with a presentation and the scan of their own annotated copy. The hour is Socratic: students bring questions, the coach steers the discussion.
What gets taught
Lectures
Sixty-four live lectures a season, twice a week. The cohort works through what the coaches are reading and writing that week: the case files just produced, how to run them in round, the strategic adjustments for the next tournament. Some sessions preview the upcoming weekend; others debrief the last one.
The Debate 101 library is the standing reference: sixty recorded lectures on the format itself, from case construction through theory and kritik. New students start there; returning students come back for specific topics. The library is updated each summer to reflect what changed on the circuit.
Prep
Prep is the work behind every speech. Cases, blocks, rebuttal redos, the files that turn an argument into one that holds up in a round. Break’s research staff produced 698 files across the 2025–26 season: roughly five thousand hours of topic-specific work, all authored by coaches competing at or recently elite in the format.
The backfiles library is the foundation. Three hundred files including impact, K, theory, and more updates: the argument types that apply to every topic. The library is rebuilt every summer, before the season starts, because last year’s arguments lose to this year’s circuit.
After every session
Every session, regardless of format, ends in a record. The record exists because the work is hard, and a debater who came back to it on Wednesday should be able to find what they left on Monday. The walkthrough below opens one of those records.
A session opens to a summary of the hour, a post-session quiz on the concepts that came up, the revision notes the coach wrote, the attendance record, the coach’s written feedback, and the recording, queued to the moments where the work got hard.
The same record exists for drills, for reading groups, for lecture attendance, for tournament prep work. Coaches read each other’s records before they pick up a session, so the debater’s account stays in one place across everything the program does.
When tournaments come
Onsite
Break coaches travel to tournaments. The coaching that happens between rounds, the pre‑round briefing, the post‑round breakdown, the strategic adjustment when an unexpected argument lands in round three, can’t be replicated remotely. It’s the part that swings elimination rounds.
Coverage extends to the major Lincoln‑Douglas invitationals each season — the full list is below.
Coaches Chat
Between sessions, the chat is open. Coaches answer in shared channels day and night. Students get strategy checks at 9pm before a Saturday round, judge research at midnight before a flight, a sanity read on a new argument the morning after the cards land.
Students share their own channels alongside the coaches. The chat is where peer prep coordination actually runs: late at night, the morning of a tournament, the hour before a round.
Tournaments we coach onsite.
Selected from the 2025–2026 LD circuit. Additional tournaments added each season.
- Apple Valley Minneapple Debate Tournament
- Barkley Forum for High Schools
- Cal Invitational at UC Berkeley
- Glenbrooks Speech & Debate Tournament
- Greenhill Fall Classic
- Harvard National Speech and Debate Tournament
- Harvard Westlake Debates
- Heart of Texas Invitational
- Mid America Cup
- New York City Invitational Debate and Speech Tournament
What families see
The family account is the parent’s window. It shows fees, sessions, the documentation behind each one, the coach’s feedback, the recordings. The walkthrough below moves through the parent’s view of an active debater’s account.
What the coaches see and what the family sees are the same account, opened to different tabs. The parent can sign in as the student when they need to.