The Hillsdale College debate team flew two junior varsity teams and four varsity teams to Western Washington University for the Viking Classic Tournament. Courtesy | Instagram

When freshmen Ewan McNamara and Kate Klein attended their first college-level debate tournament last month, they did not expect to leave with the junior varsity league’s first place trophy. 

“This was my first debate tournament ever, and it was kind of weird, because I had no clue what to expect,” McNamara said. “We just get to our room assignment, and then we debate them, and we win, and then we just go to the next one, and we win. And we just keep winning.”

Debate coach and Professor of Rhetoric and Public Address Kirstin Kiledal said two JV teams and four varsity teams traveled to Bellingham, Washington, Nov. 16-17 for the Viking Classic tournament, hosted by Collegiate Advocacy Research and Debate, at Western Washington University. 

“It was the biggest tournament this semester for the organization,” Kiledal said. 

Out of the 23 teams that competed, Kiledal said McNamara and Klein had a perfect record of wins: 5-0 in preliminaries and 3-0 in finals.

“It’s not something that happens terribly often,” Kiledal said. “It’s usually a 2-1 split.”

Freshman Noah Abrudeanu also won a fourth place speaker award, scored on the areas of communication, community, and evidence and analysis, according to Kiledal. 

“The speaker award really shows you you’ve done the work of becoming a debater,” Kiledal said.

Abrudeanu, who had minimal experience with debate in high school, won the award for evidence and analysis.

“You can’t just present evidence and your cards to the judge and say ‘there’s the evidence, vote for us,’” Abrudeanu said. “You have to make a compelling argument to your judge.”

Abrudeanu said the trip, his first time on the West Coast, turned out to be a lot of fun.

“The trip was a great chance to really get to know all the other people on the team, and we really enjoyed each other’s company, had a lot of fun,” Abrudeanu said.

Abrudeanu said he was glad to receive the award, despite feeling nerves at the tournament’s beginning

“I was worried that I would get to the table and speak and then just be completely incoherent and unable to make a single argument,” Abrudeanu said. “I think my reaction was not very strong in either direction. I was happy about it, but I didn’t expect it at all, so that was definitely a shock in both directions.”

McNamara said he was not very nervous going into the tournament because he had no idea what to expect. 

“I didn’t do any debate in high school,” McNamara said. “I just jumped in because I’m kind of interested in a political career. And I thought, ‘well, debate skills might be handy.’”

Klein said she debated in high school, but not with the Collegiate Advocacy Research and Debate style.

“I was definitely terrified going in. It was a very new format for me to learn,” Klein said. “This was more focused on researching and being an effective communicator and actually developing your rhetorical skills, which I think really aligns with Hillsdale’s philosophy.”

Klein said the trip exceeded her expectations.

“It was nice to bond with the teammates and to come out of it feeling a lot closer with my teammates and like I really improved my rhetorical skills and my research skills,” Klein said.

McNamara said round five in the preliminaries stood out to him in the solid clash and competition he and Klein faced.

“We both walked away thinking, ‘Wow, you’re good. We’re good. That was just solid.’” 

Klein said every round had something memorable, but the final round was particularly fun.

“We had all of our team watching us as we were in the front of the room, absolutely terrified, because we had three judges staring down at us, and our entire team and Dr. K watching us prepare,” Klein said. “Our competitors were extremely tough. They were amazing debaters, and so it’s really nice to go against other people that really challenged us, and I feel like we really learned from them.”

Klein said because the round was so close, she was shocked when they unanimously won the judges’ ballots.

“It was absolutely remarkable. It felt like it was solidifying all the hard work that I had done over the past few weeks, and just staying up doing late nights to actually work and research and create a brand new case from scratch,” Klein said. “It was like, ‘you’re actually good at this, you can do debate.’”

McNamara said he always gave the first speech for both the affirmative and negative cases, followed by Klein.

“She has ‘impact calculus,’ which is at the end, when you’re just trying to weigh all the evidence, take a holistic view of everything that has happened,” McNamara said.

Kiledal said the debate engages in practice rounds on both the affirmative and negative side of the case every Wednesday night. According to the CARD website, the fall 2024 debate topic is: “The United States Government should adopt one of the following: a carbon tax, an emissions trading scheme, removal of fossil fuel subsidies, a cap and trade system, or a national electric transmission plan.”

“We basically need to go for or against one of those propositions,” McNamara said. “And the funny thing is, our team did carbon tax every single round—both when we were affirmative and when we were negative.”

Kiledal said this win has told the team they are doing the right things when training their new debaters.

“We have a number of goals for the year that we set out and education is our primary value,” Kiledal said. “We also want to make sure that while competition is, of course, important and you want to win, that more important than that is the development of these educational skills, the sense that that we are creating a healthy and holistic team culture and environment that really works hard and works with gratitude for what we’ve been given. And I think that we demonstrated all of those things.” 

According to McNamara, insider jokes that came out of the trip included “holy buckets!” and “that excites!”

“When you get this kind of level of thing, you get nerdy fun,” Kiledal said.

Kiledal said CARD tournaments will start back up at the end of January with a slightly changed resolution. One of the team’s veteran debaters, senior Miranda Heid, is graduating in December, but Kiledal hopes for her to attend nationals with Heid’s partner, junior Rebekah George, as Heid will still be eligible as a debater.

“We’ll come back into that tournament a little trepidatious, but ready to work hard,” Kiledal said. 

Kiledal said the team looks forward to a debate tournament potentially taking place on campus next spring as well.

“Dr. Arnn’s staff worked really hard with a granting organization last year,” Kiledal said. “They are assisting greatly through that grant with our travel budget for this year, and we’re so grateful for that.”