Room 1409.  A room full of people arguing, speaking to a wall a million words a minute, interpretive acting with a black book in their hand and passionately presenting. To many this is where they find their motivation. Debate is a program where students of all four years compete in formal arguing competitions, interpretive acting, or professional public speaking events. Debate for many people, is the lesson of becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable. Though some would describe their first tournament as an “emotional fire drill”, they found that they enjoyed the adrenalin and community more than anything.

Reecie Meyer

“My freshman year tournament was the WT tournament and I’m doing a duet¹ with Jayden Weavers. We go to rounds and we don’t know our piece. We forget it, and stumble through it; it was not very good. Then we go to the second round, the round is supposed to start at 11:30 and they post the round at 11:20 so we’re running across the WT campus because it’s in a completely different building. We’re in the FAC², and had been in the Jack B. Kelley building all day. We get to the round, and we walk in and the judge says ‘This isn’t your room.’ Then we leave the round and go back looking for Mr. Howard.

When we finally find Mr. Howard, I’m in tears because this has not been going well. It was really awful and scary. Then Mr. Howard leads us all the way back to the same room, and asks what’s going on. Apparently, the round before ours had run so late in the tournament that they were just starting, so it ended up being delayed significantly. Then I sat there and cried through our duet so we didn’t advance. At that point I was okay with that because it had been a stressful day. That’s all I did my first tournament. Then I didn’t go to another tournament my freshman year because I was traumatized. Sophomore year I came back.”

Gabriel Hunt & Kayden Forbes

“Our first ever tournament together, doing policy debate³ was Borger in 2022. We were both just novices⁴, didn’t really know what was going on, didn’t know how the event worked,” Junior Kayden Forbs said. “So our first two rounds (there’s three preliminary rounds⁵) we lost.

We kept switching our speaking order and didn’t even know what we were running⁶. Then came our third round, but Gabe told me he was going to go to the bathroom, I decided I’m going to go in the bathroom too. I walk in the bathroom, I just see red in the sink. Prior to this on the bus, we had Twizzlers. Me just being in my own little world, I asked, ‘Is that the Twizzlers?’ It was, in fact, not the Twizzlers. We ended up forfeiting our third round because of the whole incident.”

“I was having a really bad panic attack,” junior Gabriel Hunt said. “Which is pretty embarrassing, because it was not that big of a deal. I was throwing up a lot and I just started coughing up blood.” 

Lilyanna Matthews

“I joined debate around December,” sophomore Lilyanna Matthews said.

“I was gone the week before my first tournament and my public forum⁷ partner was Kayden Forbes. The tournament was on a Friday, right after school, so we didn’t have time to practice. When we got there we learned that there were only four PF teams, one of them being Liam Stayton (a state champion) and Alyicia Bice. They were the first team I ever hit, and the round basically consisted of Liam asking me questions and me trying not to cry. At the same time, me and Kayden’s Chromebooks weren’t working, so we would be switching Chromebooks in the middle of our speech.”

Kaitlynn Hoggatt

“My first tournament was Caprock last year,” sophomore Kaitlynn Hoggatt said. “My policy debate partner was Rebecca Cook and I broke⁸ my first tournament. I almost cried in my first round because I didn’t really know how things were supposed to work. After my first tournament, I wanted to get better.”

Heidi Martin

“My first debate tournament, I was doing policy debate at Caprock with Emmett Stewart,” sophomore Heidi Martin said. “We were both entirely new. Mr. Howard had told Emmett to go to the tournament the day before, so we were both thrown in. We lost our first round against Sudan High School, which was a rough round, but I really enjoyed it.”’

¹Duet: An acting piece performed by two people

²FAC: Fine Arts

³Policy Debate: CX

⁴Novices: New or inexperienced 

⁵Three preliminary rounds: Pre-finals/semis/quarters rounds

⁶Running: The speech you implement in a round

⁷Public Forum: PF

⁸Broke/breaking: progressing to the next round of debate