Last Saturday, the San Dieguito Academy Speech and Debate team competed at the first tournament of the season at Classical Academy in Escondido. The events offered at the tournament were Policy Debate and Congressional Debate. Katie Wimsatt and Eric Wimsatt took home first place in Varsity Policy and Oona Flood and Janette Jin took home third place in Novice Policy.

Katie Wimsatt said of the tournament, “It was really fun, I think it went pretty well. [Eric and I] went undefeated and we unofficially won the tournament. They didn’t actually declare the winner but our coach saw that it would have been us.”

At this tournament the officials switched the system to only declare if a team went undefeated. The topics of debate offered at the tournament included diminishing domestic surveillance ratifying UNCLOS, disbanding NAFTA, and auditing police conduct.

Wimsatt continued, “It was really cool to win. We haven’t done this well at a local tournament since freshman year when we were in novice so it was nice to be able to say we did it. Debating is always very fun, being in the round environment, hanging out with other people on the other team afterwards.”

As for the team results and prospects? Wimsatt added, “The team did really well. The other varsity policy team went two to one. We also had a novice team that went two to one. We had two novice teams, it was both their first time competing and I’m very proud of how they did overall. I think we are looking very good this season. We’ve only really had policy and congress, so two events competing. There will be more people competing at the tournament next weekend. I’m excited to see how this year goes, we’ve all been working very hard.

Next weekend, there will be an all events inclusive tournament up at CSU Long Beach.