By Kathleen Acuff
 The members of the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District speech and debate team pause for a photograph during one of their weekly meetings at Mountain View High School. Veteran volunteer coach Karen Keefer is last on the right of the third row. Near the back of the group are volunteer Terese Tricamo, far left, and head coach Robert Freeman, far right. |
For the first time in three years, students from the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District have won berths in the National Tournament of Champions, the Superbowl of debate competitions. For the first time since its inception in 1989, the district’s only intermural team will send not one but two students to the competition.
Mountain View High School juniors Prashant Rai and Stephen Hess, respectively sixth and 32nd in the nation in Lincoln-Douglas debate, will compete with only 68 other student debaters from across the country at the April 30-May 2 event in Kentucky. The two earned their tournament bids among 174 varsity debaters from 54 schools at the mid-December Blake School Holiday Classic in Minneapolis. Amassing 179 of 180 possible points, Prashant won the Holiday Classic’s top speaker award.
“Prashant has a very good chance of being national champion next year. Just being in the top 10 in the nation is an astounding testament to him and to our district and what we’re able to do for these kids,” said head coach Robert Freeman.
More recently, at the Feb. 19-21 Berkeley Invitational, Stephen placed among the top 16 debaters and Prashant among the top 32, against very stiff competition - more than 300 U.S. varsity debaters. Stephen placed fourth at the Feb. 11-13 Stanford Invitational and Prashant placed 18th among more than 200 varsity debaters from across the country. Following the invitational, Prashant placed second out of the 10 debaters invited to the Stanford Round Robin, a two-day event. In the Martin Luther King Jr. Invitational in Union City a month earlier, Stephen, the only MVLA team member entered, placed fifth out of more than 100 varsity debaters.
The state-qualifying tournament for Lincoln-Douglas debate will take place midmonth and the state finals, at the end of April. The national qualifying tournament is scheduled for April and the national tournament, for June.
Individual speech events
Sixteen team members have gone to the state speech tournament and five to the national speech championship since 1989. Five of those students earned the honor of “outstanding distinction,” which requires 1,000 National Forensics League points. Last year, team alumna Dawn Maxey, now a freshman at Stanford University, earned that honor.
Freeman took four students to state finals last year and has high hopes for this year. Last year, team alumna Laurel Lathrop, now a freshman at Princeton University, placed fourth in speech events. This year, Freeman expects MVHS senior Jocelyn Chin to do well in the interpretive speech competition.
At the Stanford Invitational, MVHS seniors Brian Radzinsky and Daniel Slate advanced to the semifinals in extemporaneous speech. Brian and senior Urvi Nagrani, also of MVHS, advanced to the finals by placing third and fifth, respectively, in an impromptu debate event called Spar. Speech competitors are not ranked nationally until the end of the season.
The head coach calls his freshmen “exceptional.” Several placed in competition their first time out. Kaela Garvin of MVHS came in fourth in dramatic interpretation in her first tournament at Lynbrook High Oct. 30 and followed that with a first place in original prose and poetry at the Bellarmine Individual Events Tournament Nov. 20. In the Jan. 29 Menlo-Atherton tournament, Kaela made it to the semifinals in both dramatic interpretation and original prose and poetry. Novice Laura Passarelli, also of MVHS, came in fifth in dramatic interpretation at the Lynbrook event, third in original prose and poetry at Bellarmine, and third again in the latter category at the Menlo-Atherton event. Benjamin Colman of LAHS came in second in the impromptu category at the Lynbrook High event, his first competition. He then entered the Homestead High School Lincoln-Douglas tournament for novices in early December and went undefeated for all three rounds. At the Lincoln-Douglas debate last Saturday at Mission San Jose, he went undefeated in each of the event’s four rounds.
Freshman Shaheen Adibi, sophomore Daniel Foudeh and junior Matt Brigham, all of MVHS, won three rounds and lost one in last Saturday’s event.
Boding well for the team’s continued strength, LAHS sophomores Maggie Moreno (original prose and poetry), Cyndhia Ramat (oratory) and Victoria Liu (extemporaneous) are “up and coming,” debate mom Terese Tricamo said.
“It is just a matter of time for them to place in their events,” she said. “They have been coming real close.”
About the team
The speech and debate team as a whole is fulfilling the promise it showed early in the season. The 35 or so students from Los Altos and Mountain View high schools, many of whom are novices this year, are garnering recognition in many quarters.
“We’ve had a building season - almost 60 percent of the team graduated last year - so we started with a very young team,” the head coach said.
Freeman, who teaches social studies at LAHS, began coaching speech and debate three years ago after more than 20 years in the computer industry. At the time, LAHS had a three-member team. He asked whether his team could “piggyback” with MVHS’s older team. The result was the blended district team, he said.
He believes the district’s unique, melded team allows students to develop camaraderie and “bury cross-town rivalry.”
“It’s the best thing a community can do for its children,” he said. “Speech and debate is the most perfect activity for grooming kids for effectiveness in life. Every time someone opens his mouth, someone judges them.
“Here’s Coach Freeman’s 15-second rule,” he added. “After you start talking, you have 15 seconds before someone says, ‘I ought to listen to this person’ or ‘I gotta go home and pull the fuzz balls off my sweater.’”
The coach said speech and debate competition calls for sustained effort that develops character. The intellectual sport - “mental jujitsu” - also demands courage.
“It isn’t something you get immediate gratification from,” he admitted. “The mark of character is the ability to defer gratification. The payoff is multiple times what the investment was, but you’ve got to have that certainty that hard work done now will yield returns in the future.”
The head coach said students who “submit themselves to the rigor and the discipline” will find that competing on the speech and debate team “can bring out of them a majesty of expression and confidence that will serve them for their whole life.” He cited the example of hardworking team alumna Katherine Zhang, 2004 LAHS valedictorian and now a freshman at Yale University.
“The transformation of this girl from a timid, scared, wooden cultural transplant to someone who is now so confident and expressive is just magical,” Freeman said.
Membership on the speech and debate team is very demanding; some tournaments last two to three days. Competition requires “a huge amount of preparation and research and a great deal of energy,” Tricamo said.
“These students maintain high GPAs,” she added. “We hear from teachers that speech and debate gives students a little edge, helps them present themselves to other people in a really strong and cogent way.”
The team also demands a big investment of time and attention from parents. They judge monthly league tournaments, which can have hundreds of competitors. The league requires one judge for every four students. Parents, led by Tricamo, also handle the day-to-day running of the team. They get the students ready for tournaments, register them with the league, raise money and more. Tricamo, former team member Sonny Batra and veteran coach Karen Keefer assist Freeman by coaching students. The team meets every Wednesday evening at MVHS.
