The debate team took a new step toward history when they won their eighth consecutive debate county championship at Churchill High School on March 3.


Although some troubling errors stalled the qualification of favorites such as junior Tianhao He and sophomore Chad Price, senior captains Nic Carter and Camilla Yanushevsky, senior Jesse Young, juniors Ahmed Qureshi and sophomores Catherine Liu and Bea Owens placed in the top 16.

 The criteria for placing in the top 16 for the judges was to first look at each debater’s season record, and then speaker points, which is simply scoring their perfomance in the debate itself. More weight is typically put into the season record than speaker points, which is arbitrary and subjective because of the nature of debating.

“We have a lot of good debaters. And debate is subjective. It is,” said William McCrady, the coach for the team. “Millions of people said somebody won, no matter who debated in the presidential debates. Most journalists say ‘So-And-So won,’ and 57% of the American people will say ‘So-And-So won,’ but 42%, which is millions of people, said the other guy won. So that could have been your judge. Always remember that.”

Despite the upsets, however, McCrady rated the season as one of his best.

“It’s one of my all-time favorites, because this team had so much spirit and camaraderie. And they had a lot of fun. They learned a lot, too,” he said. “Our meetings were sort of a combination of a quaker meeting and a Google work session.”

Junior Cassie Moomau, a member of the team, was also pleased with the continuing domination of WJ.

“We’re just really, really proud of that, and we just hope we can keep it up,” she said. “We love being champions, and we love being able to say that we’re better than the other teams.”

 REPORTER ROSIE HAMMACK CONTRIBUTED TO THIS REPORT.