CJ Day
Staff Writer
The whole debate team shifted nervously when asked why they kept coming back. Finally, after an uncomfortable silence, team member Brayden Gaston spoke up.
“I guess we’re all just masochists,” he said.
Last weekend marked the 12th tournament this year for the University of Wyoming Debate Team. While the team failed to make it past the elimination rounds, they still made a good effort, said UW Debate Director Matt Liu.
The team will go to another four tournaments before the semester ends, including the national tournament. This tournament is invitation-only, and this is the first time in three years Wyoming debaters have managed to qualify. This year, the team has notched some high-profile wins against major debate schools like Harvard in Massachusetts and Wake Forest University in South Carolina.
“It shows that Wyoming can compete against these massive schools,” said Liu. “We compete well [and] the arguments we’re making are competitive.”
Wyoming lacks the resources that many other teams have, so a win against a better equipped school is more important to the team than it would be otherwise. A school like Harvard might have one graduate assistant for every two debaters, a rate that Wyoming has no chance of matching.
“We have to put in more work to compete with people with more resources,” said debater Riley Talamantes. “When we win off of a tricky argument, it makes me feel good about our prep, like our work is paying off.”
Talamantes and her partner have beat some high-profile teams and have placed highly at a few recent tournaments. They compete in policy debate, which is less focused on quick answers, and more focused on evidence and research.
At a recent tournament, Talamantes and other policy debaters were caught unawares by some arguments they faced on the first day. That night, the debaters put their heads together and came up with some counterarguments to be used the next day. These arguments proved successful, as one of UW’s policy teams won the tournament.
“We put in all this effort, and it’s great to see talented people win,” said Talamantes.
The team spends a lot of time together, whether it is in hotel rooms, practicing in the debate club room in Ross Hall or the hours spent on buses and planes on the way to tournaments. Perhaps surprisingly, the team does not want to kill each other after an 11-hour bus ride; they say they have really banded together.
“We have a really tight-knit community, which can be hard to find at college,” said Gaston. “The people we’re around are good people to be around.”
Though the debaters are naturally argumentative, they try to keep spats to a minimum. There is no point, Gaston said, in arguing with fellow students.
“You already know what everyone else thinks,” he said. “Maybe it’s just because we’re all pretty informed, but there’s a lot of agreement on politics and stuff.”
That is one of the pluses of debate, the team agreed. For some debate styles, like British Parliamentary debate, competitors do not know the topic until the round starts, so keeping informed on current events is an essential part of the job.
Other aspects of the debate life have also found their way into team members’ lives.
“My boyfriend says I’m a lot better at tearing him apart when we argue,” said debater Kat Rubano.
Rubano said she hopes to become a lawyer someday, and said she feels debate has prepared her for the rigors of that career.
“It’s set me up for yelling at people in a court,” she said. “It’s taught me how to make your side better, and your competitor’s worse.”
Debate can be exhausting, with weekends spent on a bus going to tournaments and nights spent running through the same arguments for hours. The team members justify the work with a lot of different reasons, but they all agreed with team member Calvin Gilmer’s statement.
“I keep coming back because it’s fun,” Gilmer said.
After spring break, the team will travel to Virginia to compete in the national championships. Liu and the rest of the team said they hope that their performance will make the university proud.
