User Profile for Mr. Ross Smith (Ross_Smith)

Bio: As Wake Forest University Director of Debate and Debate Coach, he has coached the 1997 NDT National Champions, was named National Coach of the Year in 1994 and 1998, and District VI Coach of the Year in 2000 and 2006. In Best of the Decade polling he was named Best Judge of the 1990's and Second Best Coach of the 1990's. His Wake Forest teams have been ranked among the top in the nation for two decades.

In addition to coaching competitive debate, Ross directs summer debate institutes for high school students, organizes public debates and teaches Debate and Advocacy at Wake Forest.
His service includes leadership at the national level of interecollegiate debate organizations.

Editor of more than twenty volumes of the "Debater's Research Guide", the most widely respected annual guide to the policy literature and arguments surounding each year's national high school debate topics

Ross founded in 2006 the Open Source Debate Foundation which has as its mission connecting the research and analytic capacities of the academic debate community and its graduates to the wider political and policy communities.

Ross is also the creator and editor of DebateScoop.org, the nations's only blog devoted to expert coverage of political candidate debates. Coverage began with a trial run covering senate and governor debates in the fall of 2006 and is now ramping up with coverage of the presidential primary debates.

Ross is active in local Democratic party politics and was a candidate for office in the 2006 race for County Board of Education, a race that included 186,000 registered voters.

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