Over the Feb. 15 weekend, six debaters competed at the Berkeley Invitational, a prestigious tournament that has been running annually for over six decades.
Seniors Leonardo Jia and Ashish Goswami reached quarterfinals in Varsity Public Forum, a partner debate event which rotates topics monthly, earning a gold bid to the prestigious Tournament of Champions (TOC) held in Kentucky in April. Juniors Jet Tsang and Anthony Luo, also in Varsity Public Forum, reached doubles, earning a silver bid to the TOC.
Jia and Goswami have had consistently strong results — they ended a 4-month break on Feb. 8-10, when they won all six preliminary rounds, placed top two speakers respectively and reached semifinals at the 39th Stanford Invitational. The duo earned a gold bid at Stanford as well.
The speech and debate team, with about 30 members and led by speech coach Jenny Cook and debate coach Steve Clemmons, is experiencing a flood of new energy — even as the seniors bid farewell to the team, several underclassmen speech and debaters are showing strong results.
Just last month, two pairs traveled out to the Sacramento Waldorf School in Fair Oaks, Calif., to compete in a four-round qualifier to the NCFL Grand National Tournament in Chicago in May. The two teams, composed of Tsang and Luo and sophomores Tanvee Tirthapura and Sanyukta Ravishankar, competing in Varsity Public Forum, both qualified. Tsang and Luo won all four rounds and Tirthapura and Ravishankar won three of the four rounds, competing in a final elimination round, in which they won all three ballots on a three judge panel.
“NCFL Qualifiers was basically our first travel tournament — we drove up about three hours to Sacramento with two teams from Saratoga,” Tirthapura said. “The tournament was actually really interesting in that it was at a farm — it was a really, really little school, which was all outdoors and there was like a built-in farm with livestock and fruit trees.”
Tsang, Luo, Ravishankar and Tirthapura line up in front of a cow pen at the NCFL Qualifier.
The two teams also had a strong performance at both the James Logan Invitational in early January (in person at James Logan High School) and the John Lewis SVUDL Invitational (online).
Tsang and Luo won four out of six preliminary rounds, and advanced all the way to quarterfinals at James Logan earning a gold bid. They also earned a gold bid at John Lewis, where they reached quarterfinals.
Tirthapura and Ravishankar won five out of the six preliminary rounds, and advanced to the octafinals, earning a silver bid at James Logan. The two reached double-octafinals at John Lewis. Together, the teams placed consecutively, with Tsang and Luo in 8th and Tirthapura and Ravishankar in 9th in the final rankings at James Logan, out of 122 entries.
Outside of the team results, Luo also placed 10th speaker out of nearly 350 individual speakers at Berkeley. Luo, who has been debating since early middle school, noted how profoundly the debate environment has changed for him since he started.
“When I started [debate] in middle school, you would just go out there and try to do your best and, you know, whatever happens happens,” Luo said. “But now it’s a lot more consistent and competitive — everyone’s aiming for the top.”
Luo and Tsang, a week before James Logan, in the Arizona State Invitational, won all six preliminary rounds and advanced to double-octofinals, earning a silver bid.
Speech-side accomplishments indicate long-term growth potential
On the speech side, several standout performers have won at tournaments consistently this year: seniors Timothy Leung and Kinnera Potluri, junior Anagha Vitaldevara and sophomore Devika Nair.
Leung beat all competitors at the Stanford Invitational in both Dramatic Interpretation (DI) and Program Oral Interpretation (POI) and he reached semifinals in Humorous Interpretation (HI). At James Logan, Leung placed second in HI, sixth in DI and reached quarterfinals in POI, earning 3rd place for individual sweepstakes overall.
Interpretation events require participants to present an existing piece of literature, scene from a show or even speech in their own way, like a form of acting. POI uses a combination of speeches, songs and anecdotes to stitch together a story with a broader theme which can be applied to the real world.
Leung remembers spending hours fine-tuning the moments in his speeches — he’s tried out four new events this year in addition to his previous leading event, POI, with which he reached octafinals at the National Tournament in Iowa last year.
“As I was getting these pieces off the ground, it was definitely different from usual, because when I just did one or two events, I could really focus on specifics,” Leung said. “But now I think it’s been better, because I can see which pieces are doing better and which pieces I enjoy doing more.”
Potluri, a National Tournament qualifier last year, reached semifinals in HI at James Logan — she’s doing a single event. Similarly, Vitaldevara also reached semifinals.
Nair, taking on the two events HI and Original Oratory (OO), reached 3rd and 4th place, respectively at John Lewis. OO requires students to write their own pieces from scratch, geared towards sending a message to the audience that’s relevant in the real world. Nair has seen the differences between in-person and online competitions, which are two very different environments, especially for speech.
“I started speech in sixth grade, and that was during COVID, so a lot of the tournaments were online, so I didn’t get to interact with a lot of people,” Nair said. “Now that tournaments are in person, you get to talk to so many more people — I’ve met so many people from schools in-between rounds that I likely would have never talked to outside of speech.”
Team development and new outreach
Outside of the strong competition from upperclassmen, the leadership team has worked to increase engagement and competitive success of novices. Many of the successful competitors this season have been competing in speech and debate since middle school. For those who haven’t, building a strong foundation is critical, one that has shown strong results.
At Stanford, one novice pair: freshmen Devraj Bora and Andres Wang performed well in their division, winning five of six preliminary rounds and advancing to double-octofinals. Both freshmen had little-to-no prior experience in debate, and enjoyed the new competition environment.
“At first, tournaments can be nerve wracking, but after a couple of rounds, it’s easy to get the hang of it,” Bora said. “Debate has opened up my mind to how much perspectives truly matter — there’s always a case for every side, and I’ve been able to see the bigger picture more easily.”
Bora also notes the strong sense of community among team members that comes with competitions.
“The debate environment is super competitive but also very encouraging,” Bora said. “Your teammates push you to be better, and there’s a strong sense of camaraderie amongst us, even when we aren’t debating.”
The energy from tournament and novice successes has carried over through to the team’s advertising. Luo and Ravishankar run the debate team’s new Instagram account, @saratogapfd, and Nair runs the speech team’s account, @saratogaspeech. Both accounts have seen lots of traction, and @saratogapfd has garnered over 10,000 views at its peak.
“Running the Instagram account has been really fun, because we get to share our accomplishments with other people, but we also get to share within ourselves,” Luo said. “A lot of the time, not even everybody in our own team understands the significance of our results. It’s not even just about results — we spotlight our seniors or even post pictures of the food we eat at tournaments.”
The account offers outsiders a view into the true experience of competing at tournaments: long hours, team lunches and fun bonding activities, among doing normal preparation in-between rounds.
As they head into the qualification season for the National Tournament in June and the Tournament of Champions, the team is setting goals and plans for their trajectory. In the midst of it all, the seniors are reflecting on the last four years they’ve spent as members of the team.
In the future, Goswami, Jia and Leung all potentially plan to pursue coaching and/or competition in college on the side.
“I definitely want to coach privately, at least pick up a couple teams, you know, and get them to the point where they’ve started consistently bidding and winning tournaments. I think that’d be very fulfilling,” Goswami said.
Goswami is proud of how much the team has grown, and looks forward to watching it expand even more in the future.
“Participation in debate declined over COVID since everyone was online, but since then, we’ve brought back a lot of the culture and energy that the club previously had,” Goswami said. “I think winning had a large part in doing that, because it helped show people that speech and debate is a legitimate activity here, and that people care about this. And so hopefully that sparked passion in other people.”
A big part of the team’s future success will be cementing its legacy and growing membership.
“The team is in great hands — I have no concerns about it maintaining growth for many years to come,” Leung said.
