A Week for the Annals of Wilson Speech and Debate History

The district speech and debate tournament, determining those people that will advance on to the state tournament ended today. Before I tell this story in the manner in which it unfolded, let me preface this entry by saying that this week included a lot of what Ian Rocker would classify as "spanking" and "shafting" between the four competitive schools in the distric tournament. The reader has been warned.

The story begins way back at the beginning of March when the debate team realized yet again that we had four teams competing in public debate, but we could only send three to the tournament. Colin Corbett and I decided to cede our spot to Megan and Leeor, since they had been doing better than us, and since Kim and Kibe, and Ian and Jon had already secured their berths. This was an initial disappointment, but undiscouraged I remembered that there are actually four styles of debate: public, Lincoln-Douglas values, cross-examination, and policy. Everyone from our school had always done public debate since it is the simplest, most straightforward, and accessible style, but I decided to branch out and do LD values so I could go to the district tournament. The main difference between LD and public is that LD is a prepared debate, and a single topic is used for two months at a time. I ended up writing my case in the wee hours of the night a few days before districts, going into the tournament with absolutely no practice since there's no one from Wilson against whom I can easily debate LD.

Then came Wednesday evening, when the debate portion of the district tournament was slated to begin. Public debate was kind of a logjam with a mix of 12 really good and not so good teams. LD on the other hand was populated by seven people: 3 from Lincoln (two of whom had done of the event seriously before--one girl actually made it to semifinals at national qualifiers before getting torn to pieces by Jim Johnson), 2 sacrificial lambs from Madison, and myself and another girl from Wilson who wasn't exactly prepared or serious about the tournament. I had kind of a rough first round, going against Griffin Wiminger from Lincoln (one of the people who knew what he was doing). Pretty much the only reason I lost was because I hadn't adjusted properly to the format and made some terrible errors in my argument flow.

The second debate was against one of Madison's sacrificial lambs, and I dismembered him in the cross-examination and in my constructive speech. He spent his rebuttal talking about how the judge should vote for me because I was better prepared and had smoked him--I felt kind of bad for him.

Following this, I had a bye, which gave me an automatic win thankfully. First and second, going to Lincoln, were clearly decided on record and speaker points by the fourth round, so I debated someone from Lincoln for the third and only remaining berth to the state tournament. In what ended up being possibly the most enjoyable debate ever, I defeated him fairly closely and spoke fabulously.

In public debate, five teams were 3-1 after 4 rounds. Breaking it down to strength of schedule, a team from Lincoln got a somewhat cheap 1st place, leaving Kim and Kibe to debate Meghan and Leeor, and Jon and Ian to debate the nose-picker and his partner from Grant to determine the last two spots to go to state. Because it was 11 PM by the time this was decided, the two last public debates were postponed for the date of the speech portion of the tournament (today). After the battle finally ended this afternoon, Kim and Kibe defeated Meghan and Leeor on a 2-1 decision, and Jon and Ian crushed the Grant team with a 3-0 decision. The debate results were thus:

-Public-
1st - 1st seed Lincoln team
2nd - tie between Ian and Jon (1st seed) and Kim and Kibe (2nd seed)

-Public-
1st - Lincoln girl
2nd - Griffin (Lincoln)
3rd - Me

Ah! But that's not all. There are also the two other types of debate: cross-examination and policy. No one in the district ever does them, but Madison decided to throw 3 teams into CX, and 2 people into policy as sacrificial lambs so that they could merely get their team points for districts and be the default to the state tournament (where they will promptly get absolutely slaughtered--think of the psychotic Westview and Ashland teams who have so many tubs of information that they need several dollies to transport them all). Since no other schools had entries in these events (since no one does them!), Madison got 70 points by default without actually having to compete, where we got 35 points by having to go through a bunch of other teams, and Lincoln got about 40. Thankfully there were still all of the speaking events to be added to this total, but the problem is that Madison was our main competition for speech. Lincoln may have done slightly better than us in debate, but they're absolutely terrible in speaking events, so they weren't a threat. The main problem with the point situation was that speaking events give fewer points that debate, and CX earns even more than the other debate events. 1st in a speech event is 10 points, 1st in debate is 15 points, and 1st in CX is 20 points.

Three days later...
The speech tournament occurred, and we performed astoundingly well. I became the district champion this year in extemp, getting the highest ranking from all of my seven judges. My radio flopped a little, only getting 5th out of 12 for a variety of questionable reasons. Ian once again became the district champion in Oratory. Jon became the district champion in Impromptu, and he took 2nd in humorous interp. Hannah took 1st in ADS and 1st in Dual with Kelly. Beth was a close second for ADS. The list goes on. And on. It was a good day. But not good enough. We closed the point gap between Madison and us to about 20, but it simply wasn't good enough. So we came in 2nd, again, but not for being the worse team. If not for those 70 points, we would have (as Ian would say) spanked Madison by a solid 50 points. But it's not important since we're going to obliterate them at the state tournament. We have 14 entries, compared with last year's 11, giving us a good shot at moving up the ladder from 4th to 3rd or 2nd.