The Tournament of Champions for Debate is an annual national tournament in Lexington, Ky. This past year, the tournament hosted 308 schools from various locations, including 36 states around the United States as well as other nations including as the Dominican Republic, Taiwan and Kenya.
Seniors Kaden Alibhai, Emily Hu, Sophia Li and junior Sherry Zhang won their respective World Schools divisions.
World Schools Debate is a dynamic format combining topics participants can prepare for as well as topics that are unknown ahead of the competition, encouraging debaters to focus on specific issues rather than debate theory or procedural arguments.
“[Winning] feels good,” Zhang said. “It is like all of our work paid off from this year.”
These World Schools debaters were the first team in the TOC to win the World Schools format, as it was recently added to the competition just this year. These individuals competed in the final round against the Harvard Westlake School.
“This was not only my last Greenhill tournament, but my last tournament ever,” Hu said. “It was kind of like a bittersweet moment when the second the round ended; it was also when my debate career ended.”
Other students who also qualified for the Policy division at the TOC are juniors Gautam Chamarthy and Neha Bachu, and sophomores Rory Liu and Dhiya Hemchand. For the Lincoln Douglass division, seniors Adam Kesselman and Seth Lee and sophomores Sarah Koshy and Aaron Kuang qualified and competed.
These students say they have worked hard and prepared beginning a month in advance prior to this tournament.
“We make a schedule and a couple of spreadsheets,” Kesselman said. “The first one includes wins and losses for the year, the second one includes all the positions that have been read by people attending the tournament and then we break up who is going to do the work. [We do this] so we [can] walk into the tournament with all the arguments answered and then focus preparation on the sides we have lost the most that year.”
Each day of the tournament can vary depending on how far the team advances. Debaters who have been eliminated talk to other teams and meet students from other schools at the competition.
“After we debate a round, there is a period when your judges make the decision and that is when everybody just walks around, and everybody just talks to people,” Liu said.
If a debater has not been eliminated, they will use their free time to prepare for upcoming rounds.
“While you are in debates, you are always locked in, thinking about new things to prepare or new answers to write,” Koshy said.
Many coaches will come out to the tournament to help their students. The coaches will help them think of creative ideas and materials and anticipate what opponents might do.
“The debate team is kind of a precious gem that not a lot of people know about,” Director of Debate Aaron Timmons said. “The students work as hard, or harder, than any activity on campus.”
