Most notably was the team’s performance at the 2009 Adlai E. Stevenson Memorial Debate Tournament, held at Princeton University two weeks ago. “This is traditionally one of the largest tournaments of the semester,” said member Nic Zhou ’10. He and debate partner Lily Lamboy ’10, from Smith College, earned the title of Princeton Champions, defeating teams from 92 other participating schools. Among those teams defeated were Oxford University and Cambridge University, both in the top three debate teams in the world. Zhou and Lamboy defeated both Oxford A, consisting of the 2007 World Champion and a 2009 World Runner-Up, and Cambridge, consisting of a former European Champion and European Runner-Up. “This completed our sweep of major debating tournaments,” said Zhou.
In two weeks, the ACDS will proudly send two teams to the National Championships at Mount Holyoke College: Justin Patrick ’12 and Andreas Shepard ’11 will join Zhou and Lamboy at the tournament. “There will be a lot of good teams there, including a strong Yale team, Johns Hopkins and Princeton,” Zhou said. Though many of these schools will provide serious competition, Zhou joked, “we always outdo Williams.”
This year has overall been a successful one for the entire team: “We had a record number of students break out into varsity rounds, and are looking to have novice of the year, an honor we haven’t had for many years,” said ACDS president Saumitra Thakur ’11.
As the team is not losing any members to graduation, Thakur expects even greater success next year. “Our freshmen have been very promising, our sophomores are making steady process and our juniors are star-studded,” he said.
“Next year, we plan to focus on becoming even more competitive,” said Thakur. In particular, the ACDS looks forward to performing well at the World Debate Championships, which they did not attend this year. The tournament is held every December, and next year, it will be held in Turkey.
Next year, the team will take many steps to competitively improve. “We hope to have a more structured system of practice rounds before tournaments,” Thakur said. In addition, the team will make more strategic decisions when considering which members will debate at certain tournaments.
Currently, the team has approximately 20 active members. According to Thakur, the ACDS also hopes to continue recruiting new members, particularly those who were former debaters in high school.
The ACDS also plans to expand its outreach programs to help organize debate programs at regional high schools, said Thakur. “We like to house an educational tournament for high school debate teams from struggling schools.” This tournament would be modeled off a similar tournament that Yale University hosts, called Oster Weis, he said.
After having hosted the North American Championships in January, ACDS is hosting the annual Amherst Invitational Tournament this weekend. According to Thakur, this will be one of the largest in the school’s history. Additionally, ACDS will be holding the annual Speech Tournament tonight. Open to all students at the College, the competition has two rounds: one for new speakers and one for prepared, experienced speakers.