By Jaehun Lee
Arts Reporter
During the weekend of September 18, most of the varsity members of Newton South’s Speech and Debate Team traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, for the Yale Invitational tournament.
While the team did not enjoy as much success as last year, failing to win a sweepstakes award, several individuals performed exceptionally well. The team plans to focus on their positive experiences from the tournament and use what they learned for the local season.
Senior Shira Abramovich took home 5th place in Original Oratory, while fellow seniors Liel Dolev and Winson Ye along with juniors Aidan Bassett and James Rao also proceeded to the out rounds on the second day of competition. The rest of the team was able to gain valuable experience by watching other contestants in the outrounds.
“It definitely wasn’t as good as past years,” senior captain Shira Abramovich said. “I know that our coaches were definitely disappointed. However, I think that Yale is an extremely valuable learning experience no matter how well the team does.”
Fellow senior co-captain Kim Gravlin agreed.
“We didn’t do as well as we could have,” Gravlin said. “But on a personal level, we performed our best and seized the opportunity and learned from our competitors.”
Abramovich hopes that the team was able to learn a lot from this tournament.
“[Yale] allows us to look at what people around the country are doing and to really be inspired by everything that you can do with speech,” Abramovich said. “As a sophomore, I went to Yale and it really jump started my interest in speech at a varsity level, so Yale has a really special place in my heart.”
Gravlin hopes the team will be able to bounce back from its subpar performance at Yale and prepare better for upcoming tournaments.
“Even though we weren’t prepared for this tournament, we can use it to motivate ourselves to do better for upcoming tournaments,” Gravlin said. “For example, we have another tournament coming up this weekend at Northeastern, and another in a few weeks at Bronx Science. The official local season doesn’t start until October 25th, so we can apply what we learned from our experiences at Yale.”
While the speech team hopes to improve upon its disappointing performance, the debate team feels that it achieved highly, especially considering that several key leaders graduated last year.
Junior Rebecca Shaar was pleased with the debate team’s performance at Yale.
“I thought the debate team did an amazing job,” Shaar said. “We broke four teams to triple-octafinals [top 64] which is great, but I think beyond just the placement we received, we debated really well by promoting meaningful discussions about race…and running arguments relevant to the real world, which is definitely something we don’t always see in public forum debate.”
Both the speech and debate teams had many positive experiences from Yale that they hope to bring back with them to South.
“We had a lot of fun at Yale and put a lot of emphasis on supporting each other and telling each other how proud we were,” Shaar said. “The team bonding that we had at Yale and the traditions we formed will carry on throughout the season.”
“What’s great about Yale is we’re competing against people from all over the nation,” Gravlin said. “Yale has a bigger pool of competitors, so we can learn more from them than at a local tournament. We can bring what we learned from this big tournament to South’s team.”
Using their experiences from Yale, Gravlin, Abramovich, and the other captains want to help novices build up their skills and their confidence.
“As a speech captain, I’m not all about winning, because that’s not what speech is about,” Gravlin said. “Myself and the other speech captains, Shira, Jason [Ma], and Liel have decided that it’s great to win, but at the end of the day, it’s not about winning. Speech is all about becoming a confident person, a better speaker, making friends, writing skills, and so on. When you look back in 10 years, you won’t look back at speech lamenting about trophies you won or did not win, you will be thinking about the things you learned from the speech and debate team.”
Abramovich and Shaar emphasize the need for the team to be a tight-knit group.
“My hope for this team is that we learn a lot, become a more cohesive community, and that we have a lot of fun,” Abramovich said. “Of course, I would love to be successful, too, but I think those three are the most important goals, and if we work hard and love what we do, success will follow.”
