As many Garfield sports kick off their spring season, the Garfield debate team is busily preparing for states. While classifying debate as a sport can be, well, debated, the work and research students dedicate to debate is comparable to those of athletes.

Garfield’s debate team focuses on policy debate. Each school year, the National Speech and Debate Association chooses a topic for teams to debate on, with this year’s topic about increasing fiscal redistribution in the United States. Teams are split into two sides: the affirmative and the negative and captained by Reuben Wasserman and Sam Schaible. The affirmative proposes a resolution regarding the policy debate topic while the negative responds to the affirmative case and offers possible alternative resolutions.

With the extensive preparation required of teams, debate is a place for students to develop many valuable skills. “Debate has helped me with [my] confidence in public speaking skills because a lot of the time in debate, there’s at least four people paying attention to you, so you have to talk and think fast and be clear,” Wasserman said, “also research because if you’re producing your own files that you use, a lot of the time you need to find the articles and papers and stuff that you’re citing.”

Being on the debate team is also a serious time commitment. In addition to practices, where teams prepare arguments, create files, receive lectures and advice from their coaches, or practice full debates, teams also go to tournaments to compete against other schools. “At the local tournaments, it’s usually three rounds of six hours of debate Friday night, and then two rounds in the Saturday morning, and then depending on how many teams and what the records of the teams are, there might be out rounds or they’ll just declare a winner,” Wasserman said. But the team also has the opportunity to attend travel tournaments. Over break, Garfield’s debate team traveled to Berkeley, California. “I was happy with how we did. We won two, we lost four. I know it doesn’t sound very good, but those tournaments are really tough. There’s a lot of good teams. It was a ton of fun, so that’s what matters,” Wasserman said.

Now, the team is focused on their state tournament on March 15 and 16. “We’re just trying to make sure we’re ready for every team that we know is going to be there…We’re feeling ok about it,” Wasserman said. 

Debate has succeeded in many regards. “This year has been really fun. I’ve found a lot of success, personally, like I’ve won a lot with my partner and that’s been really nice to place and to win, but it’s also just been fun to work with everyone on the team and my partner is great,” Wasserman said, “I really love the community of debate. It’s awesome. Everyone is super nice and fun and good to work with. It helps that I enjoy debating, but like the community is really what makes it for me.”