By Clara Atwell, Reporter and Designer
The debate team spent Friday and Saturday, Dec. 2 and 3 at the University of Washington for the 2016 Becky Galentine Memorial Tournament, a national circuit caliber tournament attended by 22 schools with some of the best debate teams in the northwest. VHS participated in Lincoln-Douglas (LD) and Policy debate events. Although there are many more forms of speech and debate, these are historically the only two types of debate in which the team participates.
LD is a one-on-one form of debate focused on ethics and morals. The debate topic is determined by the National Speech and Debate Association and changes every two months. The topic debated at this tournament was: “The United States ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers.”
The topic — officially referred to as the “resolution” — is phrased as a statement. In half of their debates, students argue for the “affirmative” and try to prove the resolution true, and in the other half they argue for the “negative” and try to negate the resolution.
The LD team has many first year students (novices) including sophomore Mabel Moses who won six rounds and lost two, coming in at second place overall in the Novice LD Division.
“We’ve got a ton of new kids in the LD program and they’re coming around really well,” said Speech and Debate teacher Matt Tilden.
Amelia Prince, the team’s only varsity LD debater, became sick on the first day of the tournament and was only able to compete in a few rounds.
Policy debate takes place between teams of two, focusing on one topic for the whole year. Currently, the topic is: “The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic and/or diplomatic engagement with the People’s Republic of China.” Teams are told whether they are debating affirmative or negative just before the round begins, so both teams have to be prepared to argue each side.
“There’s a really broad range of what you can do,” said sophomore Elyse Decker, who participates in varsity policy debate, “which makes it really fun to debate and also really hard because there is so much you have to prepare for.”
Decker and her debate partner, senior Jack Kelly, make up one of three policy teams. They won three rounds and lost three rounds at last Friday and Saturday’s tournament.
“This is only [Jack’s and my] second tournament and we knew there were going to be a lot of really good teams, so it was pretty much what we expected,” said Decker.
Freshman Jordi Marquez-Twisdale and sophomore Fiona Westfall, were initially registered as a novice policy team. However, the novice and varsity divisions were combined, due to an insufficient number of novice teams. As a result, the two first-year debaters were forced to debate against national-caliber varsity teams and won one of their rounds.
The third policy team consists of senior Aria Garrett and junior Sasha Elenko. Although they’ve have thousands of hours of debate between them, this was the team’s first time debating together. In fact, they hadn’t even had a practice round.
“I have been focusing on the novices and not really worried about prepping myself for the debates,” said Garrett. “We really did not have a lot of stuff prepared, so we kind of winged everything.”
Despite this, the pair won three and lost three rounds, matching Decker and Kelly. However, due to their high speaker points (points awarded based on organization, ethos, and clarity, independent from the merit of the arguments made, which determines the winner of a debate), they qualified for octofinals (a round of the top eight policy teams).
“I feel good and bad [about how we did],” said Garrett. “I feel good considering our circumstances, but when we we went out…we went out with a bang.” In their octofinal round the team went up against the second seeded team at the tournament, who defeated them handily.
The next national circuit tournament is Conway Classic at Gonzaga University Jan. 6 and 7. The team has approximately four more tournaments before the State competition which will be held at the University of Puget Sound in March.
