Speech and debate freshmen surpass expectations

The parliamentary and public forum debate teams had their first tournament on Oct. 14 at Gunn High School in Palo Alto. Despite the fact that none of the captains were able to attend the tournament, in addition to a lack of varsity teams attending due to the PSAT on the same day, the team gave a strong showing, with most teams getting a score of two wins and two losses.

Three public forum varsity teams, three JV public forum and one JV parliamentary team entered the tournament. Even though this was the first tournament they ever attended, all the JV teams showed a large amount of potential.

“I think we did pretty well, since we won two and lost two,” freshman public forum debater Steven Fan said. “The results were rather unexpected, two of them we knew for sure, and two of them we weren’t sure about, we were actually surprised about which ones we won and lost.”

The varsity members have noticed that the freshman debaters have been showing particular promise and are doing much better than expected.

“The freshmen this year did pretty well,” said sophomore Ajith Kosireddy, a varsity public forum debater. “They had pretty good records, 2-2, which was better than the freshman last year.”
Despite being the first tournament, none of the students were too nervous to participate. Some members of the JV team were apprehensive about the ability of the freshmen members, but after much preparation, the JV team weren’t as nervous as some may have expected them to be.

“It wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be,” Fan said. “The first people we faced were kind of terrifying, had [a lot of evidence] and spoke really really fast, but it was actually kind of fun facing other people.”

Aside from the strong JV showing, the varsity teams are also intent on improving throughout this year.

“We faced a lot of hard teams, like a Bellarmine team, two Leland teams and a St. Francis team and we also faced the Bellarmine captains, who went to the nationals in debate. “We didn’t do as well as we expected,” Kosireddy said.

Aside from the public forum teams, the one JV parlimentary team also fared relatively well in their first tournament and are content with their results. Although they did not win, they gained experience.

“This tournament wasn’t really for how you do. But it was more for learning experience,” said freshman Jerry Yang, who was one of the only two Parliamentary members who attended the tournament.

Yang’s partner, freshman Sudeep Raj, hopes to improve and learn from the invaluable experience they obtained from the first tournament.

“It was really fun. It was more about getting prepared for future tournaments and it showed us what we needed to do to get better,” Raj said.