At the University of Kentucky’s 2023 Tournament of Champions, held earlier this month, senior Muzzi Khan won the national championship in Lincoln-Douglas Debate. The topic was “Resolved: Justice requires open borders for human migration.” After an excellent preliminary record, Khan went on to win five single elimination rounds. In the final round, he successfully defended the affirmative side of the resolution against a team from Strake Jesuit in Houston. Harker also won the National Debate Coaches Association national championship, making it only the third time in history that a team has won both titles in the same year.
Several other students also had excellent showings at the tournament. Gordy Sun, grade 11, was named second in the nation in extemporaneous speaking. Fellow junior Daniel Lin was a finalist in congressional debate. The duo of Sasha Masson and Adrian Liu, both juniors, made it to the elimination rounds of public forum debate. Dyllan Han, grade 11, and Joy Hu, grade 9, won awards in original oratory. Lastly, juniors Ansh Sheth and Kabir Buch advanced in Lincoln Douglas debate.
Because qualifying for the Tournament of Champions is a difficult task, coaches expressed their pride in the following participants who competed in a variety of speech and debate events: Michelle Jin and Carol Wininger, grade 12; Iris Fu, Panav Gogte, Ariav Misra, Max Xing and Fiona Yan, grade 11; Robert Fields, Jacqueline Huang, Kashish Priyam, Ruhan Sahasi, Veer Shasi and Jason Shim, grade 10; and Roshan Amurthur, Pavitra Kasthuri and Sofia Shah, grade 9.
This past weekend, speech and debate coach Greg Achten was inducted into the Emory University Barkley Forum’s Gold Key Society, which was founded in 1964 to honor successful high school debate coaches. Existing members of the society select coaches to be inducted, which takes place at a ceremony during the Barkley Forum for High Schools Tournament. To date, 204 coaches have been inducted, including Harker coach Jenny Achten, a 2007 inductee.
This story was submitted by Harker speech and debate department chair Jenny Achten.
Harker placed first out of 191 schools for overall team performance at a tournament held by the University of California, Berkeley, Feb. 15-17. The tournament hosted 2,458 students from 22 states, as well as teams from Taiwan. It is an honor to do so well at such a large and prestigious event.
Contributing to the award were the elimination round performances by many students across the events. In varsity Lincoln-Douglas debate, awards were won by seniors Sachin Shah and Maddie Huynh, juniors Andy Lee and Akshay Manglik, sophomores Rohan Thakur and Deven Shah, and grade 8 students Krish Mysoor and Ansh Sheth. Senior Avi Gulati and freshman Michelle Jin were in elimination rounds in impromptu speaking. In congressional debate, seniors Annie Ma, David Feng, Nakul Bajaj and Tiffany Zhao, as well as juniors Jason Lin, Nathan Ohana, Helen Li and Andrew Sun, won trophies. In junior varsity Lincoln-Douglas, freshman Annmaria Antony and grade 7 debaters Stefan Maxim and Aarush Vailaya were award winners. In original oratory, Gulati and freshmen Austina Xu and Dyllan Han took home honors. In program oral interpretation, senior Nikki Solanki won a top award. In public forum debate, seniors Amanda Cheung and Ellen Guo placed in elimination rounds. Finally, Gulati and Jin placed in extemporaneous speaking. The coaches had a great time celebrating with the whole team!
Krish Mysoor, grade 8, had a record-setting weekend in debate, placing first at the Damus Hollywood Invitational, hosted by the Harvard-Westlake and Notre Dame schools in Los Angeles, Nov. 2-4.
Mysoor is the only eighth grader in memory to take first place at a varsity national qualifier to the Tournament of Champions (TOC). TOC-designated tournaments are considered to be the most challenging debate tournaments because they attract the most competitive schools from multiple states. The topic for the event was whether or not the United States ought to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels.
Students who reach a certain level of elimination-round success at two of those events are invited to compete at the most elite varsity championship at the end of the year. It is extremely rare for a middle school student to even reach early elimination rounds at TOC tournaments, let alone to have a perfect preliminary record and then go on to win five elimination rounds in a row. The team is very proud of his outstanding accomplishment.
Lincoln Garrett, the head debate coach of the University of Kentucky, which hosts the Tournament of Champions, noted of Mysoor’s accomplishment, “That is incredible. To go from learning the activity a short while ago to winning a competitive tournament is remarkable.”
Mysoor is known for his hard work and being a great teammate. His remarkable success has attracted quite a bit of attention from the national debate community. Go Harker speech and debate!
Team Harker crushed it at the National Speech & Debate Tournament, where Haris Hosseini ’19, and Avi Gulati, a rising senior, nailed first and second places in original oratory. This event, billed as the largest academic competition in the world, is the culminating event of the speech and debate season. And there’s more good news: Alycia Cary ’19 made it to the semifinals for oratory; Andrew Sun, a rising junior, was 15th in congressional debate; and Jason Huang ‘19 made it to the semifinals of congressional debate.
“When these results are added to earlier results at the National Debate Coaches Association National Championship (sophomore Akshay Manglik’s top-three-in-the-nation finish in Lincoln-Douglas debate and Anusha Kuppahally, grade 12 and Maddie Huynh, grade 11, finishing fifth in policy debate), we have had quite the season!” noted Jennifer Achten, speech and debate chair.
Check out the feature article on this year’s speech and debate team in the spring/summer 2019 issue of Harker Magazine or right here, reprinted in Harker News!
Editor’s Note: Harker’s speech and debate team ended on the highest of notes, with students taking first and second at the National Speech & Debate Tournament in mid-June. Check out these additional updates to the speech and debate year!: Nationals, middle school speech and debate results
This article originally appeared in the summer 2019 issue of Harker Magazine.
Roshni Bhatnagar ’11 doesn’t recall why she was drawn to speech and debate during her sophomore year at Harker, beyond noticing that other students seemed to be having a lot of fun on the team. “I just know that I enjoyed it immensely once I joined,” she said. She competed in Lincoln-Douglas debate, a one-on-one format that emphasizes logic, ethics and philosophy. Competitions offered a reward for the weeks of hard work conducting research and writing arguments. “Debate was a phenomenal opportunity to be exposed to different ideas, to learn how to compete and to have fun traveling to new places,” Bhatnagar said.
She also noted that Harker’s team and coaches were encouraging and supportive. “Whether I won or lost, it was always OK, because we were encouraged to see each debate as a step in the road and a learning opportunity.”
Bhatnagar had been out of high school for several years before truly appreciating what she learned as a student debater at Harker. “I developed strong critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, as well as the mental agility to think quickly and to recognize patterns,” said Bhatnagar, who will be an internal medicine resident at UCLA this fall. “Thinking strategically and analytically at such a young age was key to my development as an excellent communicator and listener, skills which serve me well in my work with patients now.”
Top Notch Hundreds of current Harker students are gaining the skills Bhatnagar spoke of – persuasion, organization of thoughts and ideas, intensive research and information literacy, poise and presentation – while finding success on the national speech and debate stage. The students are guided by the expertise of Harker’s speech and debate teachers Jenny Achten, Greg Achten and Scott Odekirk at the upper school, and Shania Hunt and JJ Kim at the middle school, who are in turn aided by numerous coaches (several of whom are Harker alumni).
Launched in 1998 when the upper school was founded, the speech and debate program has grown into one of Harker’s most popular student activities, with 115 upper schoolers and 175 middle schoolers involved this year. It is one of the best programs in the nation, consistently sending students to national competitions and winning both individual and team national titles.
As both an academic subject and an extracurricular activity at Harker, speech and debate emphasizes the connection between high-intensity learning inside the classroom and intellectual competition outside of class. “Our academic curriculum is largely about teaching kids to think critically about modern sociocultural controversies,” Odekirk said. “We translate that learning into the applied format of extracurricular competition, which adds so much to students’ intellectual and personal growth.”
Upper school students are required to take a course in the speech and debate department – at the introductory, intermediate or competitive level – in order to compete on the team, while middle schoolers can take speech and debate courses as electives. Upper schoolers mainly prepare and practice for tournaments during class time, while middle schoolers meet three times a week after school.
“Harker’s program is unique because of the dedication of a highly qualified faculty that is solely focused on teaching and coaching speech and debate,” said Jenny Achten, speech and debate department chair for grades 6-12. “We also receive incredible programmatic resources and support.”
Harker is a member of the National Speech & Debate Association, which chooses topics for student debaters, sponsors tournaments, and offers conferences and resources for teachers and coaches. Harker students compete in four categories of debate, including Lincoln-Douglas, congressional, public forum and policy (see page 41 sidebar for descriptions). Students choose from a variety of speech categories, depending on their personal interest, including original oratory, dramatic interpretation, impromptu, extemporaneous and humorous interpretation. Speeches are either memorized in advance of a competition or prepared quickly (in 20 or 30 minutes) during the tournament. Harker students compete at 35 to 50 tournaments a year, though no one student attends all of them.
“We believe students should have the freedom to select the number of tournaments and events of their choosing, depending on interest and time and how well they can balance other commitments,” Jenny Achten said.
The competitive season runs the entire academic year, and this year, students have competed at tournaments in Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Phoenix, New Haven, Conn., and Jacksonville, Fla., as well as at local and regional tournaments throughout California (see page 39 sidebar for highlights). Eleven Harker students qualified for the postseason Tournament of Champions, held in late April at the University of Kentucky, and five students will compete at the National Speech & Debate Tournament in Dallas in mid-June.
“Tournaments don’t have age requirements so if a younger student – say a seventh grader – is advanced enough, they can compete at the varsity level, rather than junior varsity or novice,” said Hunt. “They may be in a little over their heads at first, but they learn fast.” It’s fairly common for upper school debaters to attend middle school practices to mentor and coach the younger students. Ariav Misra, grade 7, welcomed support from Harker’s upper school students after struggling at a varsity tournament in congressional debate. Harker’s older debaters help Misra with prepping bills and resolutions and give advice on how to compete effectively. “I love the sense of community on the team,” Misra said.
Jason Lin, grade 10, agreed. “The team has created a truly unique, wholesome dynamic where the advanced debaters don’t hesitate to help novices with whatever they need,” said Lin, who participates in congressional debate. “Older students are even enthusiastic about helping underclassmen with things not related to speech and debate, like math homework.”
The program has had such an impact on students that recent alumni often return from college to serve as assistant coaches. This year, Anika Jain ’17 and Ayush Midha ’15 have assisted the team as time allows.
Jain, who just finished her second year studying economics and social policy analysis at Rice University, recalled her days of being inspired by older debaters. “They were so skilled in argumentation and in spreading, which is a fast-talking technique used in policy debate, and that motivated me to improve my skills,” she said, noting that she hopes her assistance with current Harker debaters provides similar motivation. “It’s great to advise students on aspects of debate that confused me as a middle schooler.” Midha debated for Harvard University while earning a degree in human developmental and regenerative biology. He plans to attend medical school after spending a year in research at Boston’s Joslin Diabetes Center. As a high school student, he competed in policy debate and attended summer debate amps, intensively researching a topic and practicing debate with 30 other students. “Debate offers an interesting duality of a hypercompetitive activity that turns into a form of deep collaboration,” he said.
Midha also mentored middle schoolers while at Harker, and this year he watched two of his former mentees (now in grades 11 and 12) reach the quarterfinals of a national championship tournament. “That was the proudest moment of my involvement in Harker debate,” he said.
Alexandru Iftimie ’03 recalls lugging around several 20-gallon tubs of documents at debate competitions in the days before digital files were readily available. “We had to be prepared for every possible argument,” he said. “Those tubs contained piles of highlighted research at our fingertips.” Iftimie debated for the University of Southern California – coaching Harker students during the summer – and earned a J.D. from Yale University. He recently left the U.S. Department of Justice to return to the Bay Area as an attorney for a private-sector law firm.
“I still use the critical-thinking, publics peaking and advocacy skills I learned from debate,” Iftimie said. “Those skills have been tremendous assets to me as a lawyer.”
Student Driven Harker’ speech and debate program wouldn’t be as successful as it is without the students who commit to learning debate techniques and skills while conducting hours and hours of research.
“Speech and debate are academic competitions that allow our very bright students to apply their knowledge and test their wits against their peers, all while getting immediate feedback,” said Greg Achten.
Students join the program for a variety of reasons, from a desire to learn more about current events to wanting to lessen public speaking anxiety to their parents suggesting it.
Oftentimes, they’re hooked by the first taste of competition. Krish Mysoor, grade 7, tried speech and debate at his mother’s insistence and attended seven tournaments before he broke into the quarterfinals. “Taking all of those losses early on taught me that I was in it for the experience and the love of this brain sport more than I was into just winning,” he said. He has since seen more success, making it to a bid round for the Tournament of Champions this year.
Harker’s teaching and coaching staff works to de-emphasize a “winner take all” attitude in speech and debate. “We talk a lot about realistic expectations,” Greg Achten said. “We talk about goals not associated with wins or losses, such as achieving a better understanding of an argument or improving in a particular debate technique.”
Competing in speech and debate provides tangible rewards for students beyond wins and losses, noted Haris Hosseini, grade 12, who recently earned third place in original oratory at the Tournament of Champions.
“I’ve become a better speaker, writer and friend,” Hosseini said. “My capacity for empathy has deepened by listening to those wildly different in background and circumstance than me.”
Madison Huynh, grade 11, joined the debate program in sixth grade because she wanted to have intellectual discussions on topics beyond what she was learning in class. “I love debate’s basis in curiosity, research and strategy,” said Huynh, who finished fifth in the nation in policy debate at the National Debate Coaches Association National Tournament in April.
“From learning how to work on a team to developing strong critical thinking skills, being a part of speech and debate is truly a unique experience,” Huynh said. “It offers education and real-world skills in the most fun, intellectually spirited way possible.”
A banner year for speech and debate
In 2018-19, Harker students participated in dozens of speech and debate
tournaments across the country. After achieving great results during the
fall and winter, students continued to shine on the national speech and
debate stage this spring. Here are a few highlights of their successes:
Western Junior Varsity and Novice National Championship
(held at San Francisco State University, March 9-10)
Harker set a tournament history record by having the top six finishers
in JV Lincoln-Douglas debate – Deven Shah, Akhilesh Chegu, Karoun
Kaushik, Arnav Dani, all grade 9, and Krish Mysoor and Ansh Sheth,
both grade 7 – close out two quarterfinals and all of the semifinals,
making them co-champions. Shah also was the top speaker in the
By Jenny Achten, Speech and Debate Department Chair, Grades 6-12
The middle school speech and debate team had an outstanding weekend at the Middle School Tournament of Champions, hosted by the University of Kentucky on May 11-12.
The team won first place in overall sweepstakes for the best performance at the tournament by any school. Shoring up this award were the top speaker in Lincoln-Douglas debate, Ansh Sheth, grade 7, and top speaker in policy debate, Deeya Viradia, grade 8. Arjun Krishna, grade 7, Krishna Mysoor, grade 7, and Mir Bahri, grade 8, also won debate speaker awards.
Harker had a three-way closeout of the final round in Lincoln-Douglas debate with Alexander Lan, grade 8, Kabir Buch, grade 7, and Mysoor sharing the championship. Joe Li, grade 7, and Sheth also cleared in Lincoln-Douglas. The policy team of Bahri and Viradia made it to semifinals. Additionally, Arissa Huda, grade 8, was in the final round of extemporaneous speaking.
The coaches are all thrilled with the results of our students’ hard work! A special thanks to Shania Hunt, middle school debate teacher, who did a fabulous job of organizing this large and complicated trip. The students were not only well prepared, but were safe and had fun.
Harker students performed very well at the Tournament of Champions last weekend. This prestigious speech and debate tournament, hosted by the University of Kentucky, is open to students who have performed well at varsity invitationals, and Harker qualified a number of students.
Junior Avi Gulati won first place in original oratory, an outstanding achievement! Senior Haris Hosseini was third in oratory, and Nikki Solanki, grade 11, was third in program oral interpretation. Senior Alycia Cary was in the semifinals of oratory. Additionally, Nakul Bajaj and David Feng, both grade 11, and Andrew Sun, grade 10, all made it to the semifinals of congressional debate.
Finally, Akshay Manglik, grade 10, and Sachin Shah, grade 11, qualified to compete in Lincoln-Douglas debate. Both junior Prerana Acharyya and Solanki (who qualified in two events!) qualified to compete in dramatic interpretation. It was thrilling for the whole team to see so many Harker Eagles do so well at the tournament!
Nine Harker students were presented with National Speech & Debate Association Academic All American awards this month. Nikhil Dharmaraj, grade 12; Avi Gulati, grade 11 Anusha Kuppahally, grade 12; Annie Ma, grade 11; Sachin Shah, grade 11; Kelly Shen, grade 12; Nikki Solanki, grade 11; Clarissa Wang, grade 12; and Cindy Wang, grade 12 were honored for their “academic rigor, competitive speech and debate success and personal excellence.”
Fewer than 1,000 students are awarded out of more than 141,000 student members of the National Speech& Debate Association, which puts these ten students in the top one percent of all student members, nationwide.
To earn the award, students must have completed at least five semesters of high school, earned the degree of Superior Distinction in the organization’s Honor Society, achieved a certain level of GPA, and demonstrated outstanding character and leadership. Watch for the full story of this year’s speech and debate team in the summer issue of Harker Magazine. It’s been a great ride!
Top notch news from the National Debate Coaches Association National Championship! Held at Glenbrook South High School near Chicago, the tournament comprised 188 debate teams from 64 schools from across the nation, and Harker teams finished in the top five in both policy debate and Lincoln-Douglas debate.
In policy debate, Anusha Kuppahally, grade 12 and Maddie Huynh, grade 11, were quarterfinalists. This was Kuppahally’s last debate tournament, and it was the second year in a row that she finished in the top five at this championship. In Lincoln-Douglas debate, Sachin Shah and Quentin Clark, both grade 11, reached elimination rounds, finishing in the top 20 in the nation. Akshay Manglik, grade 10, was named the 10th overall speaker at the tournament and reached the semifinals, finishing in the top three in the nation, an impressive feat for a sophomore. Overall the trip was a great success and the coaches are very proud of the students and all of their hard work. Watch for the summer issue of Harker Magazine, which will include an article on this year’s speech and debate activity!