Preparation. Arguments. Counterarguments. Resolves. This is how the varsity debate team prepared for the tournament at Dwight Englewood against Leonia, Dumont, Cresskill, and Dwight Englewood teams on December 7.

        Senior Amelia Antzoulatos earned the award for first place speaker with 71 speaker points. Junior Jane Kim and junior Craig Schulman tied with a student from Dwight Englewood to earn the award for second place speaker with 67 speaker points. Senior Seo Yoon Oh tied with a Leonia judge to earn the best judge award, and Kim and Antzoulatos earned the award for second place team with a record of 3-1 and 101 points.      

Schenkel said that for this debate, the teams had to “look into [their] case books, which have a lot of information that usually provides counter arguments to the affirmative plan” for an opposing team’s plan.

This year’s topic discusses the relationship of the United States and the People’s Republic of China, and during this debate, an opposing team had a plan about counterfeit production in China, intellectual property, and bottlenecking trade in the South China sea.

According to junior Maxwell Schenkel, “the first step in formulating a good negative argument about another team’s plan is really just understanding the plan and grasping the different concepts about it.”