Two pairs of Hillsdale College debaters won second and third place for the debate team in this semester’s first competition.

In the Puget Sound Logger CARD Tournament, an online competition, hosted by the University of Puget Sound on Oct. 18-19, sophomore pair Noah Woo and Jonathan Evans claimed silver in the varsity team category with a 4-1 win record.

“I think this was a good way to start the year,” Woo said. “All our varsity teams were very successful, and I’m excited and hopeful for the rest of the year.”

Last year, Woo and Evans placed as both a team and individually in multiple junior varsity tournaments. This tournament marks the pair’s first competition in the varsity league.

“We were a little intimidated,” Woo said. “But doing so well in this tournament, showing we can actually win rounds, definitely alleviated some of those fears.”

Varsity pair junior Ryan Rodell and sophomore Noah Gabric placed in third, also with a 4-1 tournament record. 

In addition to the team placements, Hillsdale’s four varsity pairs swept the individual awards, placing first and second in all categories: speaker, analysis, advocacy, and community building. 

Woo, Evans, and Rodell earned first, second, and third respectively in overall speaker points, which evaluate how well articulated and organized an individual’s arguments are apart from winning the round.

Sophomores Noah Abrudeanu and Joseph Jiang placed first and second in community building.

Woo and Evans won first and second in advocacy and placed first and third — with Rodell winning second — in analysis.

The teams debated the fall 2025 Collegiate Advocacy Research and Debate resolution: “the United States should substantially promote greater unionization by implementing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act or facilitating sectoral bargaining.”

The team had to cover a lot of ground doing research, according to Kirstin Kiledal, director of debate and professor of rhetoric and public address. Though the CARD league uses a closed library of limited acceptable sources, Hillsdale submitted half the literature for approval.

“The PRO Act itself is 100 pages long,” Kiledal said. “We had to read that and know the definitions of terms — we needed lots of building in order to move forward.”

For sophomore Ewan McNamara, the hours the Hillsdale team put into research showed during the tournament.

“Hillsdale proved it did the most research in terms of figures, numbers, and examples,” McNamara said. “It’s good to see Hillsdale keeping up and exceeding other teams in the league with research and advocacy.”

In a league that leans more liberal, the accepted sources didn’t tend to criticize unions or either of the resolutions, so to argue against the predicates, the team had to get creative.

“We used a stance where you reject unions as a vehicle to get higher wages and workers rights and instead view them as a struggle between higher and middle class,” Woo said.

For McNamara, this tournament showed his debate growth from a freshman who’d never debated to a varsity competitor who won 5th place overall with his partner.

Hillsdale also had a team of three who competed in the junior varsity division with a 2-3 record. 

Kiledal said after this last tournament, the team will be working to improve its cross-examination.

“Debators from all teams — and even from other universities I judged — were regularly giving back cross examination time,” Kiledal said. “Cross examination is extremely pertinent to offensive and defensive strategies.”

According to Kiledal, the group will also continue to research sources and improve its debate theory knowledge before its next competition on Nov. 1 and 2.