When the sports teams at New Trier get to State, they are showered with praise and recognition. They become heroes of the school, champion competitors who’ve beaten the odds and come out on top.
But they’re not the only competitors at New Trier. When the debate team makes it to State, they receive almost no recognition other than a morning announcement. It seems like nobody cares. But that doesn’t get them down.
Recently, the New Trier debate team did extremely well at the District tournament. However, they have their sights on a bigger prize.
“We cleaned house at the district tournament. Out the top five teams at the end, four of them were New Trier,” said Junior Jonathan Shenkman.
New Trier’s debate team is constantly operating at a National level, in a way that isn’t easy to make clear over the morning announcements.
What makes debate so confusing is that there are three different kinds of tournaments. The biggest tournaments are National Tournaments.
If you do well in a National Tournament, you get something called a bid, which gets you into something called the Tournament of Champions, an extremely prestigious event. Then there are the National Forensic League Nationals, and then there are local tournaments, like state.
“My mom doesn’t get it either” said Shenkman.
“People don’t understand that when we say we’re going to Apple Valley that we’re going to something really big, because it’s on the National level. If we win something like that, we’re going to be a lot more proud than if we win State,” said Shenkman.
It seems like this system contributes to the Debate teams low profile. I certainly know that when I hear that they’re going to Apple valley, I never think about how prestigious our Debate team is for going there.
Still, to blame it all on the system is a little ridiculous. While more clarity within the system might help them achieve some recognition, the fact is that people will most likely always give a little more attention to athletics.
“Maybe it’s because there’s more after high school athletics. There’s college athletics, then professional. Yeah, there’s college debate, and then Law school, but it’s not the same. You see a list of the top 100 athletes, not the top 100 lawyers.” said Junior Noah Quinn.
But why aren’t there profesional debaters? Why are the only places to professionally debate within the courts and on the campaign trail.
“There’s a more societal focus on athletics. We don’t want to change the focus to us, we just want more recognition. We want more funded tournaments, not Pep club coming to our events” said Noah Quinn, Junior.
Still, even with a lack of recognition, there are still plenty of reasons to do debate.
“On debate trips, we get a good opportunity to improve our argumentative and research skills. I think that all of us on the team can say that that’s really helped us within our classes.” said Quinn.
It also helps them learn about things outside of school, sometimes drastically so.
“It helps us stay really up to date with current events, because the topics change every Tournament. So it’s all right out of the newspapers. For instance, our next topic is Latin American drug policies.”
Still, it’s not all academic. “Now I recognize so many people, and have made so many friends at these national tournaments, it’s amazing” said Quinn.
Not just anyone can do debate, however. It’s something that definitely requires some natural skill.
“You have to start with an inherent sense of logic. There’s not that much training you can actually do. You can get better at speaking, and there is some technique you can learn, like how to structure an argument, but if you don’t already undertand the basic logic of argument, there’s not a whole lot you can do,”said Shenkman.
This means that going into their first tournaments, most debaters really are rookies. This is where they’ll get most of their experience.
“You can usually tell how good someone is going to be based on their first tournament. We all did well at our first tournaments, so we kind of knew we could develop.”