The debate team has had a great amount of success this past year, according to coach Derek Heath, winning tournaments in categories that may be new to the team and dominating in others. The Sunset High School tournament was no exception.
The main highlight for the team in this Sunset tournament was winning in the Public Forum category. Public Forum consists of a team of two people, and they have to research and make cases for a specific topic. Then they debate against another team of two, making their case and then arguing with the other team about the case. Junior Matilda Foster competed in the round with her partner, junior Seren Curtis.
“You read a case, they read their case. Then you rebuttal it by having an on-the-clock time of asking each other questions back and forth, then you come up with arguments against their case. Then the judge votes if you win,” Foster explained.
This category has been mostly dominated by Sunset and McDaniel.
“Sunset has like ten different public forum debate teams, and that’s kinda their specialty,” Foster said. “We’re both specialized in public forums, so we both compete for number one. Sometimes they get it and sometimes we get it, it’s kinda fun.”
Foster and Curtis won the public forum tournament, along with Max Kilburn and Florence Knape making semi-finals at the event.
The duo of Foster and Curtis have debated for a while, with both of them learning what they specialize in, making them a tough team to go up against.
“[Foster will] find the really good evidence, and I’m really good at case writing, narrative wise, writing something that sounds like what should be said and writing something that’s convincing,” Curtis said.
Another thing about debate competitions is that even though Heath is the coach most of the work is self-sufficient and done by the debaters.
“It is entirely their success, they have achieved it on their own,” Heath said. “The cases are theirs, the evidence is theirs, the arguments are theirs, the performance is theirs, it is entirely theirs.”
Moreover, it was only Knape’s and Kilburn’s second time competing together in this Sunset tournament, and they were semi-finalists in Public Forum.
“It was very exciting. It was only our second time working together, and we have been very successful as debate partners so far,” Knape said.
Knape had a main highlight from the tournament.
“We went up against this really good Lincoln team. Before the round we were looking at their record. We saw that two weeks before they went to a really nice tournament in Arizona,” Knape said. “So we were like, ‘Oh sh*t’, and we ended up beating them, so we were really excited when we beat them.”
After this win, the team looks ahead to qualifying for state and going to state. With the duo of Foster and Curtis already qualifying, according to Knape. Other teams are on the outside-looking-in as of now, and with a couple more tournaments to go, it’ll take more success for more teams to qualify.
“Right now, we are close to automatically qualifying for state. I believe we have to make [the] semis in one more tournament,” Knape said. “We have a couple more chances to do that, and if we don’t, we also have districts, which we really gotta fight for a top spot.”
But public forum wasn’t the only category the team won in. The team also placed in many other categories.
Sloane Sally won third in Novice Public Forum. Stella Carnes won first in novice Radio. Cassidy Finn won fourth in novice Radio. Tommy Chatterton won fifth in novice Extemp. Emily Blacker won sixth in Open Poetry. Casey Coleman won second in Open Extemp. Finally, Foster also won third in Open Extemp.
