One of UW’s Policy Debate Teams recently attended the National Debate Tournament in Kansas City, Kansas.
Carter Henman, a senior studying Philosophy, and Spencer Culver, a senior in Communications, qualified to compete against 71 of the other best-in-the-nation policy debate teams this year.
“When I was younger I had a habit of arguing with my parents a lot,” Culver said.
Culver and Henman have both been involved in debate going on nine years now.
“Debate gets me high. It’s exciting, fast, lots of adrenaline, very little sleep, long weekends, hotel beds,” Henman said. “It’s addicting, it’s brain candy.”
Currently the UW Debate Team has two teams of two and in total is a group of about ten people. They focus on policy debate, which involves a resolution or topic decided upon at the beginning of the year where then teams of two debates the negative and positive sides for that topic at various tournaments throughout the country.
This year’s topic was whether the United States should implement a climate policy to reduce/restrict greenhouse emissions.
“We spend a lot of time reading academic journals, news articles, and construct arguments out of that,” Culver said.
Culver and Henman will spend another year at UW on the Debate Team, then Henman plans on going to law school and Culver is considering a career in either marketing or political communications. For their last year, they intend to requalify for the National Debate Tournament and find even more success than they did this year.
“It [National Debate Tournament] is a much bigger deal than other tournaments. It’s very difficult to get there and it’s basically the goal of most [debaters] to get there and do well,” Culver said.
The recent trip to Kansas included everyone on the team. The rest of the team traveled to help Henman and Culver with preparation for rounds.
“They help us with research, they do practice debates with us all throughout the season,” Henman said. “Every time we do well we couldn’t have done it without them. Qualifying to the National Debate Tournament is a team achievement.”
At the tournament Culver and Henman went through eight preliminary rounds with three judges per round. They won three rounds, defeating Georgetown, James Madison University and University of Texas at Dallas. In those eight rounds, the team had nine judges vote for them to move forward. They didn’t make it out of the preliminary rounds, finishing 61st out of the entire tournament.
“Coming in we didn’t have any aspirations to win it, we really just wanted to beat some good teams and get on some people’s radars for next year,” Travis Cram, the Director of Forensics at UW, said.
He has coached the UW Debate Team since 2010, helping UW to continue their 14 year streak of qualifying for the National Debate Tournament.
The team met all the goals they set going in to the tournament and have high hopes for next season. Cram said he believes Culver and Henman and the rest of the UW Debate team will do very well in the coming season.
