Senior Isabelle Cho and junior Reba Prabhakhar and juniors Ashton Chen and Atharv Vyas from the Speech & Debate Club finished as quarter-finalists in the Public Silver Forum at the national Tournament of Champions (TOC) at the University of Kentucky on April 22, 2024, according to the Tabroom website.
The TOC is one of the three largest annual high school national speech & debate championships, alongside the Speech and Debate Association (NSDA) National Championship and the National Catholic Forensic League (NCFL) Grand National Tournament, speech & debate coach Charles Schletzbaum said.
“Of the top eight teams in (the Public Silver Forum), two of them were from Milpitas, which is the best our school has done in recent history,” Schletzbaum said.
To help Cho, Prabhakar, Chen, and Vyas prepare for the debates, speech & debate Public Forum Debate coach Victor Umana always discusses the topic with them together and assigns them a research assignment, Umana said
“A lot of the times we will answer some questions that I think are relevant to the topic,” Umana said. “We’ll use that as a discussion point to discuss background information about the topic (…) Then, they’re tasked with outlining a set of arguments in order for us to discuss and decide whether or not that’s the route we want to go in regards to writing our first draft of arguments that we can present at a competition.”
To attend the Tournament of Champions, Cho and Probahakhar had to qualify by going to other tournaments first, Cho said.
“You have to make it to the eliminations of (a tournament) in order to get a TOC bid,” Cho said. “We had to go to as many of the big qualifier tournaments as possible in order to get enough bids.”
A topic that stood out to her and Prabhakhar was whether the UN Security Council should have permanent memberships, Cho said. TOC was a good place to have academic discourse on important topics like Israel and Palestine and the Russo-Ukrainian war, Cho added.
“My personal favorite topics are the geopolitical topics,” Cho said. “Debate features a lot of history, but at the same time, all your evidence has to be from current events, from (policies) being passed right now.”
Going into the tournament, Cho and Probahkhar’s expectations were not very high since they had to fly from Barcelona and compete the next day, Cho said. There was a big time difference, and they didn’t do much research while traveling in Europe, she added.
The tournament “was really exciting,” Cho said. “This is the highest place Milpitas has placed before. (…) It’s also bittersweet because that was my last tournament.”
Going into the pre-eliminations, Chen expected his team to get three wins and four losses (3-4) because they started their preparation very late, he said.
“What ended up happening was we ended up going 6-1,” Chen said. “We (became) the seventh seed in the tournament overall, and we ended up making it to quarters.”
Chen and Vyas’s chemistry during TOC was unmatched, although they could’ve worked on their preparation better, Vyas said.
“Overall, in terms of my first full year debating, I feel I have accomplished a lot; I’m proud of it,” Vyas said.
Unlike the stereotypes, speech & debate doesn’t have that high of an entry barrier, Chen said.
“I think (Vyas) and I really showed that if you put your mind to it, regardless of where you come from, you’ll be able to succeed in the debate space,” Chen said.
Freshman Aadya Rai qualified for the NSDA National Championship which will be held in Des Moines, Iowa, from June 16-21, 2024, by participating in the Lincoln Douglas (LD) debate at the NSDA Last Chance Qualifier, speech & debate and LD Debate coach Aadaf Zahoor said.
“The (NSDA) had their national qualifiers already, (…)” Zahoor said. “This Last Chance Qualifier is unique because it was open to the entire country. It wasn’t just people in the (NSDA) that she was debating against.”
Rai’s biggest struggle during the NSDA Last Chance Qualifiers is that she was used to doing circuit debate in middle school, Rai said. Circuit debate involves fast speaking and using all kinds of LD theory that only debate-coaches-judges would know, she added.
“When I went to high school, there were more parent-judge debates,” Rai said. “It’s more like what do you need to say to convince a parent and that’s what I found difficult.”
Previously, she did not qualify for the NSDA National Championship when she participated in the district qualifier tournament, Rai said.
“I got crushed, I didn’t even go to the elimination (rounds),” Rai said. “(NSDA) Last Chance is a national tournament where the top 16 out of 236 qualify and go to nationals, I didn’t think I would qualify but I somehow did, my record was 8-1.”