Speech and debate team looks to replicate success from last year at the four major final tournaments

Despite a coaching change early in the year, the speech and debate team is entering the qualifying season on an string of successful performances and is looking to have its best season in recent years.

Four major national tournaments that will be held during May and June will hold their qualifiers in the next month.

At the Stanford Invitation Tournament held on Feb. 9-11, juniors Adhit Sankaran and Ronak Pai received their third silver bid of the year in public forum to go along with the gold one they received at Las Vegas.

At the Golden Desert tournament in Las Vegas on Feb. 2-4, SHS teams prevailed in their respective events.

Sankaran and Pai received TOC Gold bids for getting to quarterfinals, while sophomore Neil Shah and freshman Sajiv Shah (no relation) received TOC silver bids for their appearance in octafinals. Junior Ujjwal Krishnamurti broke to octofinals in Lincoln Douglas, while senior David Koh broke to double-octos.

At the NCFL qualifying tournament in Sacramento on Jan. 26-27, the debate team qualified one team to the NCFL Grand National Tournament, while the speech team qualified two students. The Grand National Tournament will be held in Milwaukee on the weekend of May 25.

Sankaran and Pai went 4-0 and qualified in public forum. Meanwhile, juniors Siva Sambasivam and Ashwin Ramakrishna got first alternate to the tournament in public forum.

Meanwhile, in speech, junior Anishi Patel placed second in Original Oratory and qualified to grand nationals, while freshman Harshini Velchamy placed fourth and also qualified. Junior Connie Liang placed fifth and became first alternate in the category.

The team also had top two seeds for the elimination rounds in debate with Sankaran and Pai receiving first seed after going 4-0, and Sambasivam and Ramakrishna receiving the second seed based on speaker points.

Sambasivam took the first overall speaker award with Ramakrishna following behind at third. Sophomore Neil Shah and Sankaran also placed high, getting fourth and fifth speaker respectively.

The team attributed their performances to their improvement throughout the season, especially with the younger teams earning more experience during the second half of the season.

“Being able to attend so many tournaments has done wonders for us,” Sankaran said. “We’ve improved so much. In this semester alone, our team has received one gold bid and five silvers.”

Members hope this improvement over the course of the year will materialize into success at the major national tournaments.

“This has been one of the best seasons in recent memory. We are in a better position than we were last year, in terms of teams qualifying for National Tournaments, and we still have a couple tournaments to go,” Pai said.