Seniors Katie and Eric Wimsatt made waves for the SDA speech and debate team this year after ranking 41st for policy debate in the country. Their ranking marks the first time in four years that a SDA team has been ranked, said Katie.

According to Eric, both became interested in speech and debate after watching their brother participate during his time at SDA. The siblings began participating in speech and debate their freshman year at SDA.

To improve for their speech and debate tournaments, Katie and Eric put in a lot of time and effort, working and researching for speech and debate almost every night. “In terms of work time, we average about 30 or 40 hours a week doing research, giving practice speeches, and preparing for tournaments,” said Katie.

Research in particular takes up a lot of time for the siblings. “We just spend most of our free time doing research for the debates,” said Eric.” Everything we say is basically backed up by some other person who’s smarter than us who said it before.”

To be ranked 41st in the country, the brother-sister team have had to put in extensive effort throughout their time at SDA. “Ranking took a lot of work,” said Katie. “It’s kind of a combined improvement from the past four years. Doing well at tournaments helped out a lot in terms of getting the points to get us on the rankings board. So just kind of everything compiled together got us there.”

According to Katie, ranking in debate consists of two different systems. The first system, for which Katie and Eric are ranked 41st, ranks teams based off of points given for wins, losses, and advancements to elimination rounds at tournaments.

The second system or ranking uses bids, which are earned by reaching elimination rounds at competitive tournaments. Two bids allow a team to advance to the highly competitive Tournament of Champions. “Eric and I have two bids and we’re 1 of 45 teams in the country that have those bids, which means we’ll get to go to the Tournament of Champions in Kentucky at the end of April,” said Katie.

The siblings’ ranking is the first time in four years that SDA has had a speech and debate team ranked in the top 50. “It’s really exciting because it just shows that our policy program, and speech and debate as a whole, is doing really well…I’m really excited to see what happens from here,” said Katie.

While both siblings began speech and debate four years ago for the same reason, each now finds it interesting in a different way.

For Katie, the competitive spirit and subject matter draw her to speech and debate. “I really enjoy my event policy debate because it’s really intense competitively,” said Katie. “You have a topic for the entire year so you go really in depth on that one issue…It’s really interesting to learn about all of these both domestic and foreign policy issues and possible ways of solving these problems.”

Eric is drawn to speech and debate by the opportunities it offers to learn and to meet people. “I just kind of like it,” said Eric. “It’s fun to learn about things, travel, and meet some people across the country.”

According to Eric, both are looking at colleges that have policy debate programs and hope to continue with it in the future.

In addition, Katie hopes to use what she has learned through policy debate in her future, both in college and beyond. “From all the things I’ve learned about policy debate, it’s kind of influenced what I want to do,” said Katie. “We had a topic our sophomore year about the oceans and that made me really interested in environmental science. So, I want to major in that. Since I also love international relations, I want to combine environmental science with international relations in college and just kind of go from there.”