On Oct. 14, the Westwood Speech and Debate Team competed at the St. Mark’s tournament in Dallas, Texas. The tournament, which started on Friday and continued across the weekend, attracted debaters from around the nation. The Westwood team sent students competing in two categories of debate and in one speech event.

Continuing on their path of success from past tournaments are Linette Page ‘19 and Maximilian Wolf ‘19. Both extempers have been placing consistently at past tournaments, but to place in a national tournament is a first for both of them.

“I got sixth place at this tournament,” Page said. “I was pretty excited to be able to compete with people who were good, it was surprising, but fun.”

Even though both competitors did not break the top three, the achievement of finals in itself seemed to be sufficient.

“I was aiming to maybe break to finals if possible,” Wolf said. “There were many national out-round competitors at this tournament who have gone actually eighth place at nationals, and I was lucky enough to along with another of my teammates to get to finals at the tournament, so I kind of beat my expectations I think.”

Cross Examination (CX) Debate also had moderate success at this tournament, with one pair of students making it to semifinals. Sophomores Daniel Shi and Ananth Kumar made it into the elimination rounds and went all the way to semi-finals, an impressive accomplishment. 

“Going into the tournament, I felt like we would have a tough time considering we were going up against the best sophomore teams in the country,” Kumar said. “I was expecting us to lose a few rounds and probably not make it into the elimination rounds.”

Kumar’s partner seemed to echo the sentiment.

“I think overall we did OK,” Shi sad. “Obviously we had better goals for the tournament, but in the end I think it worked out fine.”

In the second category of debate, the Lincoln-Douglas (LD) debaters fared just as well as debaters in the CX section. Rohith Mandaveli ‘18 continued through the elimination rounds and into the semifinals, doing better than he did in past years.

“I think it’s not just an individual effort,” Mandaveli said. “I do think that my skills have improved since last year at St. Mark’s, but it’s also very crucial that the other members of the debate team were able to stay during elimination rounds and stay, and work, and cut cards, file more articles so that I had more prep to do well. I believe that if I went to the tournament by myself I would not have won all those rounds.”