Team begins preparations for first travel tournament

Earlier in the school year, sophomore Arian Raje made plans to attend more out-of-state speech and debate tournaments. In October, he will have his first chance to compete in one at the Blue Key Invitational in Florida, which takes place from Oct. 28-30.

He will attend the competition along with juniors Ayush Aggarwal, Arun Ramakrishna and Kyle Wang.. Raje will be competing in both International and United States Extemporaneous Speaking, a speech event in which competitors are given 30 minutes to prepare a 7-minute speech on a given current affairs topic. Ramakrishna and Aggarwal will be competing as a team in Public Forum Debate.

After they expressed their interest in attending the tournament to Coach Christopher Harris, Harris made travel plans and signed them up for the tournament.

To prepare themselves for the tournament, Raje, Ramakrishna and Aggarwal have all practiced more frequently.

Raje has “been more disciplined about consistently attending practices,” while Ramakrishna and Aggarwal spend one hour per day researching.

At the tournament, all of them will face especially high stakes — the Blue Key Invitational offers a bid to the prestigious, invitation-only Tournament of Champions at Northwestern University to all competitors who advance to a certain round. For speech, all quarterfinalists receive a bid; for debate the cutoff starts in octofinals.

Nonetheless, none of them feels too much pressure to perform, given the sheer difficulty of the contest. In debate, for example, only 16 competitors out of the 200 entries will receive a bid.

“There isn't really anything we expect,” Ramakrishna said. “We're going to the tournament to try to get a bid to the TOC, but we don't necessarily expect anything since it’s hard to receive a bid especially at a tournament like Blue Key.”

Raje, similarly, is hopeful but doesn’t expect to earn a bid to the Tournament of Champions, which he also attended last year as a freshman and did not advance to the elimination rounds.

“I don’t really have any expectations other than just performing at the best of my ability,” he said.