Debate team shifts focus to public forum at recent tournaments

Dozens of high schoolers, including 10 debaters from Saratoga High, crowded around a single sheet of paper taped against a wall at Gunn High School on Oct. 4. The wall contained the list of students who had qualified for the elimination rounds in a league tournament where students competed in Parliamentary and Public Forum debate.

Among the list of qualifiers, however, were no SHS competitors.

Going into the tournament, members of the debate team thought they had a chance of winning the competition. Its main competitors are Leland and Bellarmine High School, two of the strongest debate teams in the area.

Although there was a high number of experienced public forum teams, such as sophomores Ayush Aggarwal and Elicia Ye,  competing in the tournament, no Saratoga teams advanced above the preliminaries. Even with this disappointment, though, they said they gained a lot of experience and knowledge in the event.

“I learned a lot about the style of public forum debate,” sophomore debater Varun Meduri said. “I now know that we have to prepare a lot more for future tournaments because we only prepared for this [tournament] three days in advance.”  

During the weekend of Sept. 26, the school’s varsity debate teams also participated in the Howard and Diana Nichols debate invitational hosted at The Harker School. Seniors Sweeya Raj and Nupur Maheshwari, the Public Forum team captains, entered elimination rounds with a 5-1 record and reached the octofinals round before losing in a 2-1 decision.

The September public forum topic revolved around whether the U.S. federal government should pay reparations to African-Americans for the injustices done to their ancestors in slavery.

“It was stressful to come up with a con case because it could come across as racist,” Raj said.

The team coaches, however, had prepared the team well with arguments. Raj said that coming up with contentions was fairly simple since professionals had trained the team well. Moreover, Maheshwari said that her and Raj’s logic arguments strengthened their cases, allowing them to use minimal evidence.

Additionally, Raj said that the judges at the tournament were not exceptional. She said that the parent judges’ lack of experiences took away from the debate aspect of the tournament.

“For the round that we lost in, there was one debater judge and two [parent judges,]” Raj said. “The debater judge voted for us because we won the debate on the flow, but the parent judges didn't really understand what we were getting at, so they voted for the other team because they were better speakers.”

Although they thought the judging was unfair, Raj and Maheswari still did well in the tournament.

The rest of the debate team, however, did not proceed to elimination rounds. Most pairs out of the eight entered won three rounds and lost three rounds. Nevertheless, Raj believes that with what they learned  at the tournament, the debate team can significantly improve.

“I don't think the tournament was a learning experience as much as it was a clarification to [Raj] and I that we are solid debaters,” Maheshwari said.