Newtown High School (NHS) Debate Team members set their sights on the future as they reflect on their performance at a recent major international tournament at Yale University.

The tournament was none other than the international Yale Invitational High School Tournament, held on September 19 and 20. As their first major tournament of the year, NHS Debate Team members spent the first few weeks of the school year rigorously preparing for it.

According to NHS junior Atley Ammerman, who is one of the team’s three captains alongside NHS seniors Sonya Feder and Meghan Bailey, this is common for big debate tournaments. At tournaments of this scale, he said they usually get the debate topic around one to two months ahead of time.

The topic of the recent Yale Invitational was whether the United Kingdom should rejoin the European Union or stay separate from it.

Ammerman said the team received an small, official brief of the topic, and primarily used the sources given through that. However, they also used outside sources since teams are allowed to use any sources they find.

Having gotten this question a month in advance, the members of NHS Debate Team got to work right away. They held their first meeting on August 27, just two days after the school year started.

“We spent at least several hours a week [researching],” Feder said. “We would work on it during our meetings, which lasted like an hour during those couple of weeks. But then we’d also go home, work on it more, and then meet over weekends to work on it more.”

Even the day before the tournament, Bailey said she remembers going onto the team’s shared document and seeing four people typing at 1 am.

That energy carried over into the first stages of participating in the tournament. Feder said the team was hyped up from the moment they arrived at Yale with their coach, NHS science teacher Geri O’Sullivan.

“And then when the rounds got released and we got what side we were gonna be on, the hype kind of died down a bit as we realized that this was actually here,” Feder explained. “But then that adrenaline came back and really carried us through the first debate round, which was after a full day of school and driving there.”

Between travel time and how the last debate of the tournament’s first day ended at 10 pm, it was a long day for the NHS Debate Team.

Building The Team

While the team did not qualify for the third day of the tournament, which is designated for the top performing teams, Feder said she is still incredibly proud of the team.

“I feel like in recent years, we’ve been building the team up, so we might not have placed at the top necessarily, but we’ve improved a lot as the years have gone on,” Feder said.

Ammerman agreed, as when he joined the team as a freshman, he said there was “almost no one on the team.” Even last year, the person who had the most experience with debate was Feder, who was a junior at the time.

Regardless of performance, Feder said teams get reports on how they did in terms of presenting themselves, as well as speaker points.

She, Ammerman, and Bailey were three of the students who competed as part of the NHS Debate Team.

The school actually had two varsity teams and one junior varsity team participate in the tournament’s Public Forum debate. Varsity Team 1 featured Feder and Ammerman, and Varsity Team 2 had Bailey team up with junior Henry Lynch, while the Junior Varsity Team consisted of sophomores Sam Evans-Oquendo and Jessup Burton.

Each team member is expected to research and be prepared to argue both sides of their given topic. At the beginning of the day, Ammerman said they have no idea which side they are going to walk on first.

“So you really need to be able to split everything equally,” Ammerman continued.

Bailey called what they do a “team effort.” The team will split up into partners, where one person will debate one side and the other person will do the other side.

“This way everyone’s experiencing both sides as a team, even if you’re not necessarily working on the [affirmative side] or the opposition,” Bailey said.

Local Versus International

In addition to international tournaments, the NHS Debate Team also competes in debates held by Connecticut Debate Association (CDA), which hosts statewide tournaments once a month. The debate team calls these tournaments CDAs.

At these tournaments, the NHS Debate Team gets the debate topic when they arrive. The team receives a 12-page brief, and has an hour to prepare to write a case. Following that, the team debates the topic for four rounds.

Ammerman said he prefers CDAs compared to other debate formats since the team has had much more practice with the tournament’s Parliamentary debate style. This style uses different timing compared to Public Forum, which is the format used in big international tournaments like the recent Yale Invitational.

“At CDAs, you’re only allowed what’s in the brief, so the arguments sometimes can get a bit out there, but they’re relatively more constrained,” Ammerman explained. “And because of the format, there’s more speeches and shorter speech times.”

Feder said another big difference between the two is that international tournaments have crossfires, which is a few minutes of open back-and-forth between one person from each team. These are not included in CDAs, which feature minimal interaction between the teams.

Ammerman said the topics they debate about usually fall under law, environment, and government and policy. Bailey felt the topics in CDAs are not as broad as those in international tournaments.

“Our recent one, it was still a huge topic, but it was more centralized to the United States, where as opposed to these international tournaments that focus on the world,” Bailey explained.

The Pros Of Debate

Regardless of which format they debate in, the three captains all said they love what they do. Feder said the amount of experience they get on the statewide and international stage is really valuable, not just as debaters, but also as people.

With the recent international debate, Feder said it helped strengthen their critical thinking and time management, as well as their teamwork and leadership skills.

“We work on the case together most of the time, so as we were adding people into the group that would be going with us to Yale, we were trying to catch them up to where we were,” Feder said.

As the three captains, Feder said they worked really hard to make sure everyone was on the same page and enjoyed their time at Yale.

Ammerman said going to these big international tournaments also gets them to experience other techniques of debate. Since CDAs are limited to Connecticut schools, he said they tend to debate the same teams.

“So just going to these international or national tournaments, you get to see people using different techniques from across the world, which you can adapt into your own,” Ammerman said.

Bailey said the team often debriefs after CDAs and international debates, where they go over their performance and point out techniques they saw other people use in the tournament.

She said being a captain not only helped with leadership, but also being able to see and listen to both sides of an argument.

“You learn to really take that into perspective and understand where people are coming from,” Bailey said. “And then being able to teach that skill to people who are new to the team or have less experience ... is just really special.”

Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.