Kamehameha Debate Recap

The first off-island qualifying debate tournament is always scary. We’re caught at this pivotal point where NITs, the first (and hardest) opportunity to qualify to States, have already passed; after this tournament, our only other option is Districts, which tends to have a very small entry pool because it’s just us and Hilo, meaning very few people qualify. Regardless, we came into the tournament with spirits high and excited.

We met at the airport around 8:45 on Friday morning, and got to our hotel by noon. Because we didn’t have to leave for Kamehameha until 2:30, we had plenty of time to walk around Honolulu and get food. When we arrived at the school, we found an air-conditioned room to hang out in between rounds and got our stuff set up.

We had people competing across a wide variety of events this tournament. It was only Debate, but we still had 16 competitors in all events. Acacia and Nithera were competing in Novice Lincoln-Douglas (LD), while Oscar, Kenji, and Sofia were competing in the varsity division of the event. The LD topic is the same for January and February, meaning that all of the LD debaters were well-versed in their topic area (the morality of nuclear weapons) and felt very prepared. In Public Forum Debate (PF), Emmie and Kylie were a team in the novice division, while Takumi and BJ’s partnership and Ben and Soren’s partnership competed in Varsity. They had a new topic area for February regarding sports betting, but all the teams had worked hard on their new cases and came into the tournament ready. In Policy Debate, there weren’t enough teams for a novice division because it was only Parker competing in the event, so all four teams were in Varsity. The teams were Kiran and Petunia, Marina and Stella, Lance and Michael, and Charlie and me.

I came into this tournament with a dilemma. I knew that I couldn’t go to States because it conflicted with the play. One team out of the four qualifies to States, based on the results of the final round. I was tempted to forfeit all of our rounds to ensure that we really were just a placeholder to meet the entry minimum, but Ms. Wilczewski also had me as Charlie’s partner so that he would hopefully learn something at his first Policy tournament and get to know the event better. It felt wrong to intentionally lose rounds knowing it would jeopardize the entire reason we came to this tournament.

My initial solution was to come into the tournament with a terrible case, so I wrote one about unicorns. It seemed like the perfect case because while it was funny and creative, it wouldn’t win a round easily, so we could still try our best. Unfortunately, during our first round against Kiran and Petunia, the judge stopped the round after two speeches and called the tournament director because she felt that we were wasting her time and being disrespectful by running a stupid case. The round ended as a forfeit for both sides, meaning that even though Kiran and Petunia had some incredible responses to our arguments and were starting off in a position to win, they didn’t even get the chance to get the win. When I told Ms. Wilczewski what had happened, I was worried that she would be upset with us, but she defended us with her life to the judge and the tournament director, explaining that it is absolutely not appropriate for a judge to end a round just because they think the arguments are stupid. We ended up getting a second chance to debate them that night, and even though people reassured us that any normal judge would love the case, we didn’t want to risk that happening again and decided to proceed with an old, safe case.

The rest of the tournament went mostly smoothly. We got back to the hotel around 10:00 that night, and quickly Doordashed dinner before going to sleep. The next morning, our rounds started at 8:00 AM, meaning we had to be up and out by 7:00. Rounds proceeded as normal, and when the announcements for the final round came out, Oscar broke to finals in LD while Charlie and I competed against Lance and Michael in Policy finals.

This presented us with another dilemma, because the winner of this round would be the team that qualified to states. In order to send a team to Nationals, there have to be 4 teams entered at the State tournament. We could only qualify two at Districts, and only one team had qualified at NITs the month prior, so if Charlie and I won this round and qualified, knowing we can’t go to states, nobody would be able to qualify to Nationals. I didn’t want to risk this happening in any capacity, so the four of us talked about it and made the very difficult decision that Charlie and I would forfeit the final round. We had already had 3 good rounds of debating experience, and I would rather not compete at all than go into a round with the intention of losing.

In the end, it was a very awkward situation, but it played out for the best. Oscar won his final round and ended up in fifth place overall in Varsity LD, though he was pre-qualified to States because he was the LD Champion at NITs. We headed back to the airport before the awards ceremony that night, knowing that we would be able to receive medals and certificates at States in April. Normally, we would spend Saturday night on Oahu as well, but we had decided to return that night to save money. All of us were grateful for this, knowing that we could get home and sleep in our own beds that night. We got Panda Express and discussed our judge comments and round results in the airport while waiting for our flight, a tradition for Oahu tournaments. We landed in Kona around 9:30 that night and headed home, anticipating a good night of sleep in the wake of an eventful and tiring tournament.