Daniel Hendrycks' Blog

Our school's speech/debate team went to a tournament this weekend (Friday and Saturday) at Kikapoo(?) Schools in Springfield. Overall our team did not do so well, contrary to how it does normally, - we are in the top 10% of the country - since many team members were taking SATs.

This was my first tournament, and I was told I was going the tournament the day before, so I had to rush and review arguments and get evidence .

The topic was: "Resolved: States ought not possess nuclear weapons" The style of debate was LD.

While we we were waiting for LD rounds to start (we had 5 hours) Cody (person I construct/peer review my arguments with) and I constructed new arguments for the negative side, since it is hard to protect. We pretty much used up 4 of the hours making arguments for the negative and it was still hard to defend, the rest we prepared for our debate.

I lost the first one; the guy I went against was very convincing, but now reflecting the arguments were semi-easily refutable. I was shaking from being nervous during the first, that may have added to me losing.
Two of the debates were simple, one person had no good counter arguments and the other I could barely hear, so the judge probably did not either. Then I debated someone who looked my age, he was extremely good; I took the negative side (and as you know, it was hard to protect). Somehow I brought fourth tons of confidence against him and spoke very well. In the end it was extremely close and I won it.

That brought me to a 3-1 record

Since I was not able to pull off getting a 4-0 streak, I could not go onto quarters. So Cody and I walked around for the remainder of the time until semi-finals, we then watched the semi-finals and the arguments given were amazing! Seriously, it was terribly close; blowing our arguments out of the water, and our school's as well. I wrote down what they said so I can now try to make better arguments and speeches based off of the magnum opus that was their debate.

(I probably won't share any debate stories unless I go to finals, need not be repetitive)