On Sept. 24 and 25, the Oak Park High School speech and debate team competed at the Jack Howe Memorial tournament in Long Beach. This event is the first tournament of the year where both novices and experienced speech and debaters competed. The event lasted two days for debate, followed by one day for speech. This event served as an icebreaker for the year, allowing the team to bond. 

“Oak Park has an exceptional reputation for scoring high at invitational events such as this one,” senior speech and debate captain Tiarra Joseph said. “I had high hopes that this year our phenomenal members would perform well.” 

Students competed in different styles of debate such as Lincoln-Douglass, Public Forum and Parliamentary. Students also competed in Ol, a speech event that stands for oral interpretation. The speech and debate teams have spent the last month preparing for this tournament by doing topic analysis, writing cases and prepping rebuttals.18 students attended in total, four from speech and 14 from debate. It ended up being a successful tournament for Oak Park. 

“We work to support each other, sharing information and giving each other feedback,” sophomore Navya Garg said. 

Diya Varrier, an LD novice, placed third in her category. Neel Vats and Gautam Valiveti placed ninth in open parliamentary. Bing Heine-Van Fossen placed fourth in speaker awards, Lincoln Reyes placed fifth and Muse Casanova placed sixth.

“A lot of the hard work and hours that these students put in really paid off,” Joseph said. 

Joseph, along with other captains Nick Lyle and Manas Garg, have put in tremendous effort to make sure that their practices are held in an engaging environment with lots of drills building off one another. 

“My favorite part of being in speech and debate is the fun, collaborative and educational setting that we try to maintain. While some days we work hard to understand why a single payer health care system would hurt our economy, other days we debate on the attractiveness of Shrek,” Joseph said. “While combining both the technical skills of debating and interesting topics, there is never a day that I find boring.”