Exeter Forensics Debate Team

By: Erin Sackey

The Exeter Forensics Debate Team competed at the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA) Nationals District Qualifier in Maine, winning the District Debate Sweepstakes Award and qualifying five members for the national tournament in the spring.

Lower Sachin Shetty qualified for the NSDA Nationals in Original Oratory. Partners Senior Albert Chu and Upper Shrayes Upadhyayula qualified in Public Forum Debate, as well as partners Senior Kilin Tang and Lower Aaron Joy.

The NSDA is the largest academic competition host in the world with the qualifying competition in Maine draws over 6,000 competitors each year. The association chooses a topic every one to two months that competitors are expected to extensively research and prepare arguments for both sides of the topic. 

Co-heads Chu and Tang, and co-creator and initial adviser Betty Luther-Hillman made the club official last year and since then they have trained their members in Forensics Debate, mainly in Public Forum, by meeting regularly to scrimmage, giving each other feedback and researching their given topics. “We created it in order to explore different avenues of debate and different formats of debate,” Tang said.

Forensics Debate is a unique style relatively new to Exeter, where the Daniel Webster Debate Society, which practices parliamentary debate primarily, is the biggest debate organization on campus. “[Parliamentary debate is] very different from the style of debate that we mainly do at Exeter Forensics, which is public forum in which you know the topic about a month in advance. You do research and preparation ahead of time and you get to bring in that research into the round,” Tang explained.

As a relatively new club to the Exeter community, the Forensics Debate Team was able to gain traction quite quickly. “I'm really proud of the fact that we've been able to like, expand so much over the past few years to include a lot of new novices, and to really build a strong foundation for exit forensics to thrive moving forward even after I graduate this year.” Tang said.

Upadhyayula said, “We've certainly come across enough people who were just wanting to try it out in the first place and that sort of blew our expectations away with how far this club could reach in terms of getting people who were like, interested in doing a solid debate.”

Preparation for the debate was quite strenuous, but worthwhile according to the team members. “In terms of preparation, before tournaments such as this one, we all end up creating 40-50 page Google Docs full of research, arguments, refutations, etc. Basically, there are a lot of long nights before competition weekends! This tournament was especially stressful but it was very rewarding for all of us in the end.” lower Matt Dame said.

Upadhyayula weighed in on competition prep as well. “I’d say that we have in place where topic comes out the codes do a lecture, we all sort of go off on our own and do research and prepare, and then we do a lot of practice debates before the tournament, just so we can become more prepared and, sort of, sort of like hone our skills, just so we're not going and rusty after not debating for a couple of weeks,” he said.

The preparation was a highlight of the competition as well, according to Upadhyayula. “Those are honestly some of the most fun like memories I take away from EFT, just the preparation for those tournament's because that's when we're really like doing stuff together, because in debate rounds we're all separate,” he said.

As with most clubs, COVID-19 regulations had quite an impact on the competition experience. The Forensics Team attended the Nationals Qualifiers, as well as other competitions, via Zoom. Chu talks about the pros and cons to the virtual competition experience. “In some ways, this has been a blessing--we're able to attend tournaments across the country at Stanford, UCLA, UPennsylvania, etc. at drastically lower costs and we're able to bring a lot of novice teams to give them really good practice and exposure..At the same time, however, the in-person tournament experience really is a special part of debate--team bonding and building a team culture has been especially difficult without in-person practices and tournaments,” he said.

Lower Tina Li believed that the regulations helped in other ways as well. “I think I know a lot of ways, I think it's actually helps the extra productivity and just because like in the past we had to spend a lot of money on traveling expenses to like all these different tournaments that were in person,” she said.

Li also encouraged prospective team members to consider joining. “I think a lot of people think Public Forum, or Exeter Forensics is a lot of work and it is, but I think we have a really good team support system and our co-heads do a lot for us,” she said. “They're organizing everything and it's super tough with like the whole extra workload, but I think it shouldn't stop people from joining the team or just maybe dropping in to figure out, whether or not you enjoy it or not. I think although the research is pretty heavy the competition is not bad at all, so it's pretty fun.”

The team expressed excitement and pride towards their performance during the NSDA Districts Qualifiers. “It honestly just feels very validating for all the work we put in as a debate event that requires a lot more initial research and preparation, compared to the sort of omnisport nature of a lot of other debate events,” Upadhyayula said. 

Tang shared his feelings of accomplishment: “This has always been like a little mini dream of mine to be able to go to NSDA nationals.”

Their performance marked a moment of improvement as well. “We've seen so much improvement in the ability to structure cases and in a more nuanced way and give more in depth inner analytical rebuttals, and more like in depth, like responses to arguments,” Tang said. “We've seen so much improvement in our novices that were also attending this tournament that we're really confident that once I graduate and once our other team graduates there will be talent for Exeter Forensics to continue to be successful.”