Debate Tournament

As I got involved in the UVM’s debate team, I knew I would have to put a lot of effort, time and energy in it. The concept of a debate team is something I have never heard of before, but as I heard and figure, it’s a great mean to develop and improve your speech and reasoning skills, and get deeper understanding of certain topics. Ideally your team would win during national and even international tournaments all over the country, but the main purpose is to have fun and enjoy.

During the preparation and practice debate, I realized I got myself into a seriously complicated game. I was overwhelmed, anxious and concerned. What if I would fail and lose? But the coaches and all other debaters were not worried at all: as long as I would have fun!



The tournament took place at Binghamton University, New York, a six-hours van ride away, and staying at a real American motel with diner along the highway was definitely an exciting part of it (including the sketchy red stain on the floor between the beds in our room!).





It’s really complicated, but this is roughly how it works:
The first debate starts at 8am, and takes about 1,5 to 2 hours. With breaks and lunch in between, we finished our day of four debates around 6pm. The debate itself takes place between two teams and one judge, and in the more advanced debates there can be some audience in the classroom as well. One team will be the ‘affirmative’ and bring up a case, while the other has to be ‘negative’, and come with a counter plan or something else. Bottom line is to convince the judge to vote for your plan, not necessarily on the contents, but on the way of debating.



Every team should be familiar and prepared with the national topics, which this year are desegregation, abortion, global warming and some others I forgot. The first 9 minutes is to bring up the case and read out ‘evidence’ on why the status quo is bad, and what the alternative plan is. Reading piles of paper in such short amount of time means talking in high-speed mode. It’s pretty ridiculous, because it’s just impossible to follow the speaker, and the speech thus becomes incomprehensible, although the ‘negative’ is allowed to take over and read through the evidence cards, if the ‘affirmative’ is done with it. This technique shows how the speech/debate is focused on quantity, rather than quality. There have been ‘negative’ teams who simply replied with a 9 minutes silence or dance to dispute the high-speed reading.

[Me and my debate partner Joe]

Debating at this tournament were universities mostly from the East coast. There were mainly Whites, and I could count the Blacks attending on my one hand, but there was a remarkable amount of Asian debaters. Maybe because academic debating is a known concept in Asia -at least China and Indonesia, as well?



Debating for me was funny, ridiculous, mean, bad, and friendly, but moreover simply overwhelming. We lost all our debates, but we learned a lot from it. When we were ready to debate our last debate the next Sunday morning, we turned out to have no counter team to debate against, and thus our first debate tournament was over by then.