Led by this year’s recently appointed captains, the speech and debate team ranked in almost every event at the annual Santa Clara University Invitational on the weekend of Nov. 23. Seventy-three schools entered to compete in the tournament.
Before the tournament, Head Coach Erick Rector announced new captains for most of the events this year.
Senior Mohith Subbarao, junior Supriya Khandekar and sophomore Anjali Manghnani have been appointed IE captains; juniors Sudeep Raj, Rohan Bhardwaj and Jerry Yang are the parliamentary debate captains; seniors Justin Liu and Parth Kejriwal are Public Forum captains; and juniors Rohith Krishna and Deepti Kannan are Lincoln Douglas captains. Rector has not announced any captains for extemporaneous speaking.
At SCU in the individual event category, senior Akshay Madhani and juniors Jimmy Xiao and Agastya Gupta broke to semifinals in open extemporaneous speaking. Seniors Jason Li, freshman Mitali Shanbhag and Subbarao ranked second, third and fourth, respectively, in open original oratory. In original interpretation, Khandekar ranked third.
For Lincoln Douglas Debate, sophomore Shrey Desai made it to quarterfinals, and sophomores Sweeya Raj and Michelle Chen broke in varsity public forum. Senior Aditya Choudhary and Krishna also made it to octafinals in parliamentary debate.
The team is aiming to continue to build on its early results.
“We have had a pretty good start to the season especially with our underclassmen,” said team captain senior Kush Maheshwari. “Hopefully as the season goes by, we can have as much success as we did last year.”
Although extemporaneous speaking doesn’t have official captains yet, practices are being led by the juniors and seniors. Extemporaneous speaking is one of the largest events in the league in terms of participants but the team usually sends people to the out rounds of each competition, but no one made it to finals in the first two tournaments of the season.
“Our team keeps getting to quarters and semis so we are working hard to try to break that barrier and push students into the final rounds,” Maheshwari said.