Winter Holidays Open is an international World Schools tournament for high school students. This year’s tournament (December 12th to 14th 2025) will be the 13th of it’s kind in Zagreb, Croatia.
Winter Holidays Open started out as a small tournament organized by Croatian Debate Society with a goal of providing an international debate experience for debaters from the region. With 25 teams from Slovenia, Romania, Germany, Bosnia, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Croatia, the first WHO took place in 2013.
After several years of hard work, participant feedback and help from our Chief Adjudicators Geetha Creffield, Bojana Skrt, Alfred Snider, Aisha Ahmad, Anna England Kerr and Marija Jarnjak, Lovro Šprem, Rok Hafner, Eta Krpanec, Ivona Anić the tournament grew to an event welcoming around 90 teams in Zagreb each year, with debaters and adjudicators from 37 nations – Australia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Jordan, Lebanon, Moldova, Mongolia, The Netherlands, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, UAE and USA joining us so far.
In 2017 we introduced Novice Break, an opportunity for novice teams to experience the excitement of elimination rounds. All teams at the tournament can face each other during the 6 preliminary rounds, after which there’s separate breaks with best 16 non-novice teams advancing to Open Break and 4 best Novice teams advancing to Novice Break.
We hope you’ll join us in 2025 for a great event for both new and experienced debaters.
