Twelve members of the debate team traveled all the way to Arizona to attend the Human Communications Tournament at Arizona State University from Jan. 5-8 for their first travel tournament of the year.

Team members competed in hopes of gaining bids to the Tournament of Champions. This is a tournament that teams qualify for by winning slots in earlier contests..  

Members participated in Congressional, Lincoln Douglas, Public Forum and Policy debate and Extemporaneous speaking.

The team received high marks, with juniors Ayush Aggarwal and Arun Ramakrishna advancing to octofinals and gaining a bid to the gold Tournament of Champions, an advanced tournament to be held on May 3 at the University of Kentucky. Junior Austin Wang and senior Siavash Yaghoobi advanced to double-octos where they obtained a bid to the silver Tournament of Champions in Public Forum.

Sophomore Ruchi Maheshwari advanced to semifinals in Extemporaneous speaking, and both freshmen on the team, Siva Sambasivam and Surbhi Bhat, advanced to elimination rounds, with Sambasivam going to semifinals in Congressional debate and Surbhi Bhat going to octofinals in Lincoln Douglas debate.

Yaghoobi said he felt satisfied with his performance, given that it was his first time competing with Wang as his partner. Both of them switched to Public Forum from Lincoln Douglas and hope to compete as a team in public forum for the remainder of the year.

“I read a little about the topic when it came out on Dec. 1, but it wasn’t until break started that I started preparing,” Yaghoobi said.

Although Yaghoobi started preparing later than usual, he said that it was the hardest he had prepared relative to the amount of time he had. His preparation consisted of meeting in the library with his partner and general research. As more prestigious tournaments like Stanford on Feb. 11 and Milo Cup on Feb. 17 come around the corner, the team is preparing harder than ever.

“With this being my last year in speech and debate, I really want to advance further in tournaments, and that starts with preparing and practicing harder,” Yaghoobi said.