Freshmen Jonathan Evans and Noah Woo tied for first place. Courtesy | Rebekah George
Freshmen Kate Klein and Ewan McNamara tied for first place with freshmen Jonathan Evans and Noah Woo in the junior varsity league of the University of Puget Sound Logger Card Tournament Feb. 22.
Five Hillsdale teams, including two junior varsity teams and three varsity teams, competed online against seven other schools in the tournament.
With a 4-1 record in the junior varsity league, Klein and McNamara got their second first-place win in the books.
“Their season record is two first-place tournament places and a second place tournament place. That’s really strong,” said Kirstin Kiledal, debate coach and professor of rhetoric and public address.
Evans and Woo maintained a perfect record of 5-0, losing zero ballots throughout the preliminary rounds. Evans said he hadn’t debated for a year and a half before coming to Hillsdale, so the first place win was satisfying for him.
“It’s nice to be able to get back into it and start to re-find those skills that I’ve been developing so long ago, and know that I still got it, and I can start building from there,” Evans said. “It’s good to just have that under my belt to know I was able to do that.”
In the 20-team varsity league, junior Ben Brown and sophomore Ryan Rodell finished third place with a 4-1 record.
Five Hillsdale students came out of the tournament with speaker awards — Woo earned second place, Evans placed fourth, Klein placed tenth, and McNamara placed twelfth.
The teams debated the spring 2025 Collegiate Advocacy Research and Debate resolution: “The United States federal government should adopt one of the following: a carbon tax, an emissions trading scheme, or removal of fossil fuel subsidies.” Klein said their loss in the final round in the Mukai tournament was due to the opposing team’s argument of degrowth that Klein and McNamara had not prepared to counter. But the Puget Sound tournament offered them another chance.
“We were able to go against the same team again in our final round, and we beat them — absolutely demolished them on the last part of degrowth,” Klein said.
This tournament was Evans and Woo’s second tournament with Hillsdale College. Although the pair said they had debate experience coming into college, competing against other schools at the college level still took some getting used to.
“Stepping into this, there’s just a different set of assumptions. So not only are there some stylistic differences, but I feel like the biggest difference is different shared understandings,” Woo said. “There’s an assumption that communism would solve a lot of problems, and so you can’t really challenge assumptions directly. It’s more like, ‘Hey, is communism actually fast enough to solve the climate crisis?’”
Evans and Woo’s first tournament was Western Washington Debate, where they competed in the varsity league.
“That was a good learning experience,” Woo said. “I definitely appreciated going down to junior varsity for this tournament. It’s a slower pace. It’s more like what we’re used to, where you can kind of explain your arguments, and it’s not as technical and fast, but we were able to definitely leverage our experience from varsity, for sure.”
Evans said the fourth round of the tournament was his favorite. Their opponents, while having an interesting counter plan, used some muddled arguments that were not explained very well, according to Evans.
“They were pretty good speakers,” Evans said. “But midway through Noah’s first speech, we figured out our course of attack — we executed really well, and brought that back, even though we didn’t understand it at first, and we ended up winning the route I’d say pretty handily.”
Woo said the win is really validating for the pair and makes him excited for future tournaments.
“It’s nice to know that we can actually do okay in this league,” Woo said. “It also makes me want to do better so that we can actually have a win and not share that.”
