Mar 07, 2024 At 03:19 PM EDT
In early February, two sophomore debaters from the Washington Urban Debate League (WUDL) walked into Pennsbury High School in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, knowing their dream was on the line.
The season started off on a high for Daniella Choi and Sitara Mazumdar from BASIS DC. At the last minute, the pair came together to participate in the first national circuit regional tournament of the season and they left with a coveted bid for the Tournament of Champions (TOC), the first for their league. Now they had one last chance to actually qualify for the prestigious tournament.
The TOC is one of the most esteemed debate competitions in the country and is considered the national championship for high school teams that compete on the national circuit.
"The Tournament of Champions is the hardest national championship to qualify for," Sara Sanchez, the director of programs and communication for the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues (NAUDL), told Newsweek. "It's difficult for both skill reasons but also resource reasons."
To qualify, teams must acquire two bids. TOC bids are earned when a team places high enough in certain regional or national qualifier tournaments. Debaters who placed well in the previous year's TOC or two other national tournaments automatically qualify. This requires teams to be able to travel to several tournaments to compete for bids.
Sanchez is also a member of the TOC Policy Advisory Committee—a network of 15 coaches and people affiliated with debate who make decisions about the TOC bid process.
After winning their first bid, Mazumdar and Choi struggled to secure their spot at the TOC.
"[They] had won the first tournament pretty decisively and the people adjusted to what they were doing and they got some tough breaks, and suddenly it was January and we didn't have our second bid," WUDL Programming and Development Director David Trigaux told Newsweek.
The team felt anxious going into the Pennsbury tournament. As one of the last tournaments in the country to offer a TOC bid, this was their final opportunity to qualify.
After going 4-1 in the preliminary rounds, Choi and Mazumdar made it to Octo finals and had back-to-back 3-1 victories to beat teams from Baltimore City and Bronx Science to make it to the semis. Despite losing to a Georgetown Day team in the semis, the BASIS pairing went far enough to secure their second TOC bid—the first in WUDL history.
Additionally, Mazumdar and Choi were the named sixth and eleventh overall speakers of the tournaments, respectively, out of the 118 debaters who competed. This designation is determined by the total amount of speaker points each debater receives from the judges during each round of the tournament.
"I was in disbelief when the decision came out," Choi said. "One, because I don't think we won that round [and] two, qualifying [for TOC] as a sophomore this early just wasn't within my expectations."
As soon as the shock of the win wore off, the team wasted no time preparing for their next competition.
The strategy for the TOC, which takes place in April? "Even more massive spreadsheets," Choi said.
The team is preparing for more teams and reading more arguments while crafting their own speeches with surprises that other teams might not be expecting.
While the journey to the TOC has not been easy for the BASIS duo, Trigaux said their victory was "a big validation" of their hard work and overall strategy. He noted that the pair had to adjust their arguments to win because at the very competitive levels of debate, the strategy is always changing.
"It's a pendulum—you do things that cause you to win until you stop winning and people have adjusted and come up with new angles to attack you, and they put in more work to beat you because they view you as a threat," Trigaux explained. "And once they do, you do something new."
Mazumdar said once they started winning [early in the season], other teams began prepping against them, and "the season got much harder."
But the team had the whole league rallying around them. Mazumdar said it "really took a village" to get the second bid—more practices toward the end of the season and more research, and testing new angles to build upon the work they did all season.
Choi said it was frustrating to go on constant 3-3 streaks at tournaments after winning big so early on. So the team started to do "targeted prep." This included making scouting spreadsheets listing various teams and the arguments they would run.
In addition to running practice rounds to keep the team sharp on the execution of their arguments and their techniques, Trigaux said they did "targeted research" so they wouldn't get surprised in rounds.
"We lost a bunch of rounds that we were prepared for, we took our best shot and we lost anyway—there's no shame in that," he said. "But if we lose a goofy round or the other team did something silly and we weren't ready for it, you feel bad about those."
Across the NAUDL network, Sanchez said there have been a handful of teams who have competed at the TOC. This year, the BAISIS team will be joined by fellow Urban Debaters Max Ulven and Kiernan Baxter-Kauf from St. Paul Central High School.
Because qualifying for the TOC requires immense amounts of time and resources that favor private and wealthy public schools, Sanchez said most of the Urban Debate leagues do not focus much of their resources on national circuit competition. She adds that the TOC can be a very "intimidating" space.
Once a team qualifies, the preparation only intensifies. Sanchez said there is a lot of research that goes into preparation for the TOC—from crafting your own argument to tracking what the competition runs to knowing who is in the judging pool for "mutually preferred judging," which gives debaters the chance to rate judges based on whom they would prefer to assess them in rounds.
"It's a very intense environment," she said. "Most people refer to the operations of coaches and people who are preparing for [the TOC] as 'war rooms.'"
Trigaux and WUDL recognize there is a gap in the experience and resources between those schools that do and do not qualify for the TOC. He said his debaters are "really smart but they are coming onto the playing field with structural disadvantages."
WUDL has been working on its strategy to "adjust and compensate" for any disparities when competing on the national circuit. The first is to start kids debating earlier. If students begin debating in middle school, they can come into the varsity division with up to seven years of experience. Mazumdar, for example, won the Urban Debate Middle School National Championship two years ago.
The other way is to make different types of arguments. Trigaux said WUDL cannot out-research some of the better resourced schools. So they try to be more creative, and "try something different."
The dynamics of debate partnership have also been a huge lesson to WUDL. Choi and Mazumdar were not supposed to be partners this season but ended up together at their first regional tournament, where they won their first TOC bid.
As the season progressed, Mazumdar said she and Choi "evolved" as a team.
"Our partnership works really well," Mazumdar said. "[We've] gotten more natural and fluid, and there's a lot more back-and-forth communication."
BASIS coach Messai Yigletu said witnessing Choi and Mazumdar's growth as individuals and as a pairing taught him to look more at the individual debater rather than the duo.
"Partnering up with other people can really bring out things that you don't really know you were good at," he said.
In rounds, Yigletu pays attention to the ballots to identify the strengths of each individual debater, which he said has pushed him to encourage his team to be more open to the idea of working with other people to see how other partnerships work.
He said Choi and Mazumdar have grown to become leaders on the wider BASIS team—helping judge and give feedback to the novice and JV debaters.
"They're people I trust and people I can rely on to help others on the team," he said.
Even before the TOC starts, Choi and Mazumdar's season has already been a victory. Not only have they made league history as the first pair to qualify for the TOC, but they have demonstrated to their peers that this accomplishment is obtainable.
"To see a team that they viewed as human do exactly what they have aspired to do is a validation [that] 'I can do that, too, maybe I can do that next year,'" Trigaux said. "There is a big empowerment of everybody else, especially the kids who are younger, [that] this is a space we belong in, this is a space that is accessible to us if you work hard."
For the two sophomores, this season and the upcoming experience at the TOC will enhance their skills and understanding of national circuit debate and better prepare them for the next two years of varsity debate.
Now that they have accomplished their goal of qualifying for the TOC, Mazumdar said their aim heading into the tournament is "to be the respectable team" and maybe "win one round at least."
"Since we've qualified," she said, "we want to do our very best and show up and be good debaters."
Regardless of their performance at the TOC, Sara Sanchez said the young team has a lot to be proud of.
"It's a tremendous accomplishment when it happens and everyone in the [Urban Debate] network cheers [them] on," Sanchez said. "I'm so proud of the WUDL students for getting there. I hope they have the most amazing experience and take everything they learn into their junior season next year and understand that it's an accomplishment just to be there."
The Tournament of Champions will be held at the University of Kentucky from April 20 to 22 and will include over 80 teams competing in Policy Debate from over a dozen states and Taiwan.
