How do you catch a fish? With debate! Myers Park is home to one of the country’s best Speech and Debate Teams, holding multiple titles, including state and national victories. Club members compete against other school teams in tournaments to win sweepstakes and individual awards. The tournaments consist of 4 rounds, with breaks in between, then, should you get selected to advance, a 5th final round. At the end of the final round, results are posted and awards are handed out to the winners. The team is divided into four parts, three types of debate: Congressional, Public Forum(PF), and Lincoln-Douglas(LD), and speech, which has multiple subcategories.
Congressional Debate is described by Varsity Co-captain Caroline Lam as “a mock legislative chamber where 13-20 people debate on the passage of bills by alternating between affirmative and negation speakers with questioning in between. Then, you vote on whether or not you should pass the bill.” The bills are usually very similar to what the US Congress debates, including foreign humanitarian aid and environmental sustainability. When asked why Congress is important, Lam responded, “I think that Congress is important because it teaches you to be self-reliant but also helps you learn how to collaborate with people you’ve never met before. It also teaches you to research faster because generally, a tournament has 9-15 bills that you have to be prepared to speak on and learn about in the 1-2 weeks that you get to prepare. This teaches you to be independent, resourceful, and creative.”.
The next debate style, Public Forum, is described by club president Griffin Bohmfalk as “a 2v2 event based on policy”. Topics of debate last for month-long periods and include medicare for all, no nuclear first use, and civil wars in West Asia. These topics are debated in “a very evidence-based way. It’s a good mix of performance persuasion abilities and technical debate ability” according to Bohmfalk. He states that to write a good case, “You have to be prepared and unbiased because you must see many points of view for a topic. It starts with a good claim, but it comes down to evidence. Then you get to the impact, Why does it matter, otherwise why are you making this whole platform for something that doesn’t matter.” A key part of public forum is finding the right partner. Megan McCranie, a public forum member, states that “you just need to find somebody who has a good work ethic and is motivated.” Public Forum members become informed world citizens, learning about new topics every month and preparing a case for it. “It’s cool to learn something about the world. 95% of the time you use that knowledge again,” says Bohmfalk.
The third and final category is Lincoln-Douglas, which is a 1v1 philosophical debate inspired by Abraham Lincoln and Steven Douglas’s famous debates in the 1858 Illinois senate race. Varsity co-captain Gil Altman explains, “Lincoln-Douglas differs from other forms of debate because other forms often evaluate specific policies and whether or not they should be implemented, but Lincoln-Douglas is not that. It’s more of a question evaluating morality, justice, and ethics.” Examples of topics include whether voting in the US should be mandatory and whether civil disobedience is justifiable. Altman states, “In the real world, it takes arguments more tailored to subjectivity to win over people’s opinions. This is why LD is helpful. It deals with ethical, moral, no right answer questions. In reality, that’s what a lot of significant questions in the modern world are.”
Last but not least is Speech, which includes two subcategories; interpretations and public address. Interpretations are where students like Hadley Lord interpret a piece of literature as a speech. This can be performed as duo, dramatic, or humorous. Public address is student-made, where they perform original speeches. This includes Impromptu, Extemporaneous, Original Oratory, Informative, Declamation, and many more. Lord highlights multiple benefits from speech including how “It helps with public speaking abilities in general, events like impromptu where you don’t have much time to prepare your speech help you think quicker and on your feet, which is a very useful life skill.” When Lord was asked what she would tell someone interested in speech, she said, “I would tell them there’s something for everyone.”
Recently, Myers Park hosted the 50th Laird Lewis Tournament, which is an inter-school tournament for all speech and debate events, named after the former Myers Park principal. The tournament was coordinated by Laird Lewis student chair, Megan McCranie, the parent board, and faculty club director Roselyn Coyne. When asked what went into running the tournament, McCranie responded, “The big thing is getting food donations without having to buy it. Making sure that we have enough places for people to plug stuff in, making sure the rooms are set up, directions, the food stays good, that everyone has an active role in everyone judging their competitors in the rounds, and that everything starts on time.” The tournament is crucial for the club as its biggest fundraiser. Club members and parents came out to support the club by volunteering their time. When asked how she made the tournament run successfully, McCranie replied “We started planning this tournament 3-4 months in advance, so we had lots of time to thoroughly plan what people are going to do, what kind of stuff we want to have, and having the necessary amount of people to help you out.”
The Myers Park Speech and Debate team has done very well this year, as well as hosted their tournament successfully, thanks to McCranie and Coyne. The club is always open to new members, even if you know little about the club, Bohmfalk recalls “I was like ‘I do not want to go to this interest meeting’ but I went there and fell in love.” Myers Park has been selected to host the State Speech and Debate Championship this March, where members will be competing, and they expect to win big!