Starting with Success

Introducing Roberson’s new debate team

TC Roberson’s new debate team is already off to a great start. Started this year by advisor
Mr. Taylor Sluder and the captain of the team, Junior Leo Hu, the members of the debate
team have left their mark.

The members have worked hard to gain their recent success in the first few tournaments
of the season. Sluder shares the significance of the great start, “Every tournament we’ve
gone to so far, we had at least one student or team of students place at the tournament,
and that means that they ranked high enough and scored well enough that they awarded a
trophy. And so that’s a pretty impressive feat right there, to find that great degree of
success everywhere we’ve gone so far, and that’s just a true testament to how hard the
students have worked and how hard our captain has worked to make sure that everyone is
prepared for these tournaments,” Sluder said.

Being a part of the debate team offers a variety of opportunities and experiences one may
not get as a part of the regular school day.

“I get to learn about different things that I wouldn’t usually learn about, like I wouldn’t
choose to learn about, but it’s cool,” Freshman Abbey Browning said. “It’s fun and you
meet new people, and you build stronger relationships with people that you might’ve seen
or met and said hi to, and you just get better relationships with people. It builds your
confidence and you learn to write a lot easier. Since joining debate, I’ve been able to
write essays a lot faster and easier, just because I know how to find good sources and it’s
easier to write,” Browning said.

Looking into the rest of the season, Junior Johnny Sikorski explains the team’s practice
dynamic.

“I’m just looking forward to working with everyone and helping all the other people in
the club be the best debaters that they can, because not everyone has prior experience and
the majority of the people are brand new to debating, and so they obviously have a lot of
work to do. [...] It’s a relatively low-stress environment, at least when we’re in Sluder’s
classroom. Like we can kind of just help each other, work on cases, brainstorm the best
cases, and just work on scrimmaging and work on helping each other and whatever we
need,” Sikorski said.
Like everything else, COVID-19 has negatively affected some activities of the debate
team, including tournaments, opportunities for travel, and fundamental experiences
gained from being on the team. Tournaments have been fully virtual and will continue to
be for the next few months.

Mr. Sluder describes one of the challenges brought forth because of COVID, “At the
tournament, usually, the award ceremony is a really big deal. Every single competitor
gets together and they go through the award ceremony. We applaud for them, they get the
recognition they deserve for the hard work they have done, then we go on to a team
dinner afterward. But unfortunately, that’s not the case now. There’s a Youtube video that
gets released. It’s a PowerPoint that shows who won which position, and so when Johnny
and Leo placed first in Public Forum, they didn’t get to have the nice standing ovation
that normally is given and awarded. They had to watch it on the Youtube videos. That
was a little disheartening,” Sluder said.

The future of the team at Roberson is looking good. The team has set some goals for the
year.

“I want us to have a good shot at districts, or at least see some minor success in
tournaments. I don’t have any grand goals for our first-year program, but yeah, seeing
some success in the local circuit would be very nice,” Hu said.

“Some of those goals include having a minimum number of members by the end of the
season, but our season runs pretty much the length of the school year. We want to attend
at least one debate tournament a month, and so far we’ve met both of those goals. We
wanted to have at least ten members that came regularly, and we’ve gone to our fair share
of tournaments and found some success there. We also wanted to build a bit of a
community around debate,” Sluder said.

In many schools, debate is not only an extracurricular, but also a class in school. If the
program continues to grow and find success in tournaments, there are many great
opportunities present for participants, including scholarships, travel, and national
recognition. There is even a possibility for a class here at Roberson in the future.

“I think that [the team] has a chance of growing pretty large. I think that once it gets some
traction, I hope to have a class to offer. I taught a class, it was honors credit, at Enka. I’d
love to teach that class here, and we’d teach the different styles of debate, we’d teach
public speaking, we’d teach all these other elements and aspects of speech and debate
that can help you become a more successful debater, and if that class takes off, then I
think that we’ll continue to find success. We’ll be able to grow to the point where we can
travel to Harvard, where we can travel to Yale, or Duke, or wherever these tournaments
are that we want to go to,” Sluder said.