Novice policy debaters compete at their first debate tournament
Debating the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization topic, the team of Mill Valley Mulryan and Fox placed fifth overall
October 5, 2022
For speech and debate students, fall means the start of the policy debate season. Saturday, Sept. 24, the novice policy debaters had their first tournament at Lawrence Free State.
Policy debate is a form of debate where two teams debate a resolution or topic that is voted on each year. One team is affirmative and supporting the resolution and the other team is negative and against the same resolution.
This year’s topic is about how the United States federal government is able to increase security cooperation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
To prepare for the Lawrence Free State tournament, debate coach Shawn Rafferty has been going over the fundamentals of debate.
“It’s their first tournament, so I just want to make sure they have a basic understanding of certain argument elements,” Rafferty said.
In addition to learning the basic fundamentals, the novice debaters created their own responses to arguments they may encounter at the tournament. Freshman Callyn Ambrose, one of the novice debaters, continued to prepare past this.
“The whole way there, my partner and I were reading the arguments over and over,” Ambrose said.
After learning fundamentals and making the preparations for the tournament, the debaters were able to apply the knowledge they had been learning and break down the debate, by practicing evaluating specific arguments. Even with all the preparation sophomore Sophie Hsu was still nervous for the first debate tournament.
“Previously to this, I had never done a full debate. So I was very concerned about how the rest of this was going to go. I knew what to read. But after that past that point, I was very scared on the improvisation. But eventually, after getting our butts kicked in the first tournaments, I think we were able to figure out how to improvise a lot more and fluidly,” Hsu said.
Despite the nervousness, it was a successful weekend for the debate team. In the novice division, the team of Mill Valley Mulryan and Fox went 4-1 placing fifth overall. For individual speakers freshman Lily Suman placed 5th, freshman Nathan Turvey placed fourth and sophomore Sophie Hsu placed second overall.
In the future Rafferty hopes that “things will start clicking into place, they’ll have moments where they go, oh, this is what he’s talking about, during the rounds.”
Now that the first tournament has ended, the debaters are hoping for a deeper understanding of the debate process and a general growth in their abilities.
“I hope from now on since we understand all of the topics a lot more, we’ll be able to quickly say, Okay, here’s what we need to say. Here’s what’s wrong with that. Here’s what we need to improvise with,” Hsu said.
