Flying into Emory University on Friday, Jan. 24, Speech and Debate competed throughout the weekend at the university’s Barkley Forum, with Pranav Balakrishnan ‘25 and Ethan Andrew ‘26 placing second in Pelham (Policy) Debate and Anushka Gupta ‘26 tying seventh in Extemporaneous Speaking. These teams were ranked highest in their respective events amongst a pool of competitors originating from across the country.
“Emory is definitely one of the top five most prestigious competitions for Speech and Debate,” Debate Coach Mr. Dominic Henderson said. “The pool [of competitors] is always good, and success at the tournament is definitely something to be proud of.”
Despite the challenges many competitors faced in preliminary rounds, Gupta, Andrew, and Balakrishnan were able to make it through early competition, and enter the out rounds of the tournament.
“Emory was a different experience for me as a tournament because I entered it with a different mindset,” Gupta said. “Instead of trying to do my best and see what happened, I established really clear goals in terms of the fluency and flair of my speeches. Although the competition was difficult to say the least, I’m pretty thankful for making it to semifinals because there were a lot of moments of nervousness and doubt in my mind, and the tournament helped clear them up.”
For debaters Andrew and Balakrishnan, a similar sentiment rang true.
“I think when we won round six of the preliminary rounds I felt this feeling that this really could be our tournament,” Andrew said. “Most of our elimination rounds were pretty simple and lots of other good teams were losing early on, so I had a lot of confidence. It was a lot of fun, lots of adrenaline, and a little bit less stress than Glenbrooks [another national tournament], maybe because we’ve already proven that we can get this far.”
However, as Andrew and Balakrishnan entered the final round of the tournament undefeated thus far, they found themselves faced with an unfamiliar panel of judges.
“Going into the final round I felt a certain amount of tension because I wasn’t entirely confident that we would be able to articulate our arguments clearly to the panel. In the Barkley Forum finals, there are a few traditions: there’s a large panel of judges who are all debate coaches, [typically from an older generation,] honored by the tournament. [Because of that] teams are expected to speak slowly so that the average person can understand, [compared to Policy Debate judges who are highly technical and can handle speed],” Andrew said. I was mostly worried about the judges since they typically insert their personal opinions and vote based on vibes rather than how we debated. In the end, that’s sort of what ended up happening, which was disappointing but also expected.”
Despite coming just short of being Emory champions, the team is still happy that they were able to break old debate records and keep the finals streak at Emory going.
“It’s unfortunate that we lost the finals,” Mr. Henderson said. “But the way I see it is that Westwood is constantly improving. We were able to get our first finals appearance in Speech last year, and to now have a finals appearance in Debate has kept the streak going. I know a championship victory is about to come.”
