Debate team hosts first home tournament of season, annual Charger Challenge
On Jan. 18 and 19, the OHS Speech and Debate team hosted its fourth annual Charger Challenge Speech and Debate Tournament on campus.
The team is lead by debate teacher Dr. Barbara Lowe, and it has about 25 students involved. The team attended six tournaments last semester and are planning to attend seven more this semester. This past tournament, however, was different since Lowe and the students were in charge of running the tournament rather than competing in it.
“Schools from all over the state of Mississippi come, and it’s fun for my students to be able to be the ones in charge. They’re not competing at our tournament, so they’re running around doing all the work,” Lowe said.
For Lowe and the students, hosting a tournament was an incomparable experience from traveling and competing in tournaments.
“It’s very different because rather than researching a particular topic and writing a case and figuring out how you are going to block the opponent's arguments, we are doing things like making sure we have enough ballots for all the different events and making sure we have enough food to sell in the concession stand and putting signs outside rooms so people know where to go compete,” Lowe said.
Rather than focusing on their topics and competing, OHS students worked together; each student had a job that was essential to the success of the tournament, such as working in the ballot sorting room.
“After every round, the judge writes down their thoughts on a ballot. That ballot, at the end of the tournament, goes to the people who it was actually written about, and in a lot of tournaments, it is kind of difficult to get our ballots back because we might have a missing ballot here or there, so we went through and we made sure that everyone had the right ballots and everyone had the ballots they needed,” junior and debate team member Donald Rogers said. “We just tried to make it easier for everyone, so we tried to make it to where all those problems weren’t problems anymore.”
Students got a chance to see all the behind the scenes work that goes in to successfully hosting a debate tournament.
“When you’re debating, a lot of times people feel like every round is just so important, but from this perspective, when you see how every round from literally every single person is coming out, you just understand how judges and everything just don’t care as much as the students do,” senior and debate team captain Cooper Thomason said. “So, it’s kind of interesting to see the difference between how much you care about it when you are competing but like some of the people working are just [doing their job].”
While Lowe and the students had a lot of responsibly running the tournament, they also got to have a little fun by making a tournament video and meeting and talking to people that they normally wouldn’t talk to during their usual debate tournaments.
“You get to have a lot of fun, like the video we ended up doing. So, it’s kind of cool to see everybody get to use their talents because I know our team is extremely talented in all this different stuff,” Thomason said. “I also really enjoyed getting to work behind the scenes with coaches from other schools that I never really get to talk to, but I found they were pretty funny people.”