Speech and debate captains finally announced

After a month-long trial period, speech and debate coach Erick Rector has finally arrived at the decision for who this year’s speech and debate captains will be.

The four overall team captains will be seniors Venkat Munukutla, Ishaan Kolluri, Sujay Khandekar and Shauray Agrawal. In addition to leading their own individual events, Rector said they are responsible for overseeing the entire team and organizing logistics involved in travelling to invitational tournaments.

“Their jobs are going to consist of basic overseeing of the entire team … in terms of making sure that all the freshmen are on board and understanding where they need to be,” Rector said. “Basically, doing things that unify the team, especially not just their own specific disciplines, but making sure that everybody gets together.”

Additional captains for the different events include senior Aneesa Mazumdar and returning captain senior Neil Prasad for foreign extemporaneous speech; senior Sanjna Verma and junior Kush Maheshwari for domestic extemporaneous speech; returning captains Agrawal and senior Justin Chiang for parliamentary debate; senior Bhavana Vadrevu for public forum debate; and Khandekar, Munukutla and junior Jason Li for individual events.

Although several of the captains were captain last year, some of them, including Li, are new to the position of captainship. Li said he will be a critical captain in order to help students improve.

“I am not an easy person, meaning that I don’t like to sugarcoat what I say,” Li said. “Everything is positive criticism. They always have something to work on.”

Li has had experience in various events such as Impromptu, Original Prose and Poetry and Oratorical Interpretation, and has advanced to the finals and semifinals in different tournaments for those three events. As a result, he will be helping the novices primarily with those three events.  

“I want to take [the novices] to state,” Li said. “I plan on leading that by example, so the best way is to show how hard-working I am … and inspire the novices to do the same.”

In addition to being a role model for the novices, Li said he hopes to motivate speech and debaters to work harder in order to increase their chances of success.

“One of the things I’ve been pushing for this year is making sure that everyone works for the two hours,” Li said. “It’s really an honor to be a captain and … I would like the team to do as best as I can.”

Also new to the position is public forum captain Vadrevu, who is the only confirmed captain of the three total captains to be selected out of 10 applicants for the position. She said she hopes to bring her leadership skills and friendly personality to the team in order to help novices improve.

“Overall, I come off as a more friendly person and a more accessible person,” Vadrevu said. “Bringing that friendly face is more so what Mr. Rector employed me for. That being said, I’ll do my best to also be a great resource.”

Vadrevu also plans on integrating more practice debates into the two hour meetings in order to give the novices more experience.

“I think what we’ll do this year is hopefully have everyone doing practice debates at the same time so that kids aren’t intimidated, but they can also get the practice that they need before tournaments,” said Vadrevu. 

For all the captains, balancing helping out the team and working on individually improving themselves can sometimes be a challenge. However, Vadrevu said that being captain is actually instrumental for her own success in debate.

“Teaching is the best way to kind of learn yourself … By helping these students, I’m really going to have a better understanding of the arguments that might come up,” Vadrevu said. “They’re novices, but they have some great ideas.”

With the new ideas that each captain is bringing to the team, Rector said the captains this year show great promise and dedication to the speech and debate program.

“The [captains] that we have right now are some of the most passionate speech and debate students I’ve had in awhile, in terms of really knuckling down and making speech and debate their top priority,” Rector said.