For the first time in the program’s history, the University of Wyoming Debate Program qualified three teams at the National Debate Tournament.
“The Policy Debate Team is the one that achieved the historic success of qualifying three teams to the national championship,” Matthew Liu, Director of the Debate Program, said.
UW was one of only seven colleges to qualify three teams, placing them against some of the most competitive teams in the country.
“I would like to see us break in at every tournament,” Edward “EC” Powers said.“Being a big threat that teams like Harvard and Georgetown have to watch out for, that’s how I want to see it [the program] get bigger and a lot better.”
Each of the three teams presented on different aspects of antitrust laws, the overarching topic for the annual competition, including affirmatives, critiques, and advantages and disadvantages.
“The topic is selected to allow tremendous depth since it’s a complex subject that can have a lot of different subsets and this year’s topic was antitrust laws, or the breaking up and regulation of large corporations and consolidation and anti competitive business practices,” Liu said.
The Wyoming CP Team (first-year team member Sarah Cole and third-year team member EC Powers) presented the affirmative.
“So for the affirmative, my partner and I read, at the national debate tournament, about breaking up environmental and social governance investments, which was investing in people that were investing in green tech, instead of fossil fuel,” Powers said.
“We actually only have one topic all year,” Cole said. “And that’s decided by the whole debate community nationally when we submit topic papers and then every team votes for the topic paper.”
The other two teams, Wyoming LR (first year team member Lorelei Lassen and third-year team member Kiana Radcliffe) and Wyoming CM (first-year team member Kaitlyn Campbell and Josh Mitchell third-year member), presented on issues involving inflation and shipment supply chains.
“The majority of the year, we were running a protection competition, which was saying that we should replace the consumer welfare standard, which is what most trust cases are currently decided on,” Campbell said. “I believe that we also had two new forms that we read at the NDT, one applied some interest principles to oil companies, and the other had to do with shipping supply and trust to shipping.”
The NDT, hosted by James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, was also the first in-person competition the Policy Debate Team had participated in since the start of the pandemic.
“This was actually my first in-person competition that I ever got to see because my high school debate was all online,” Campbell said. “With the amount of preparation that we put in we knew exactly how well we’d be able to do at the tournament there was no really no nervousness.”
“While it was really exciting, it was also a very exhausting tournament,” Radcliffe said. “We had eight prelim rounds spread out over three days, plus sort of getting used to being back in person debating as well.”
While the Policy Debate Team placed 34th overall at the National Debate Tournament, Liu also noted the success of the other half of the debate program, the British Parliamentary Team.
“We have a young team and they were in the finals of the novice division regional Mountain West debate conference, and then right before that tournament won the novice division of another tournament,” Liu said.
