The debate team flew to Dallas, Texas to attend the annual Greenhill Fall Classic tournament Sept. 14-18. This was the team’s first national tournament of the season. The school is competing in the Varsity Lincoln Douglas division .
Luke Rascoff ’27 said the team has been diligently preparing for the tournament.
“Everyone on the team works really hard to prepare, so doing the best that I can is really important to me,” Rascoff said. “The style of debate we do is extremely research heavy, so a lot of downtime is spent doing as much work as we can to set ourselves up for success.”
Rascoff said he is thrilled because Greenhill will be his first national tournament on the Varsity debate team.
“I’m excited,” Rascoff said. “I’m a ninth grader which means this is one of my first tournaments on Varsity debate, so I’ll be going against people that are a lot more experienced.”
Lila Daoudi ’24 said this tournament was specifically particularly difficult because it was on a national stage.
“It’s one of the bigger tournaments of the year because it brings so much nationwide competition,” Daoudi said. “It’s a very large pool of people who are very, very good at this activity, so it’s harder to do better.”
Assistant Opinion Editor William Liu ’25 won the Greenhill Round Robin Debate Tournament. Round Robin is a smaller tournament of selected debaters around the country before the full Greenhill Tournament. Round Robin style tournaments traditionally do not disclose the winner of each round until the very end. Liu said this made him worried about his final record, but he was ecstatic when he found out he won.
“I was extremely nervous about how I was doing and completely thrilled when I found out I was advancing to the finals,” Liu said.
Liu said his dedication to debate is what allowed him to do so well.
“The tournament went by really fast, and I was super surprised that I ended up winning it all,” Liu said “But I’ve really been working hard in debate last year and this year, and I’m happy it paid off in the form of a nationwide win like this.”
Liu said although he participated in Round Robin Debates and has been really successful, the reason he is still invested in debate is because of the community.
“To me, the prestige and clout from winning something as big as the largest nationwide round robin isn’t the main reason I do debate,” Liu said. “It’s the people on my team, my coaches and my friends from schools all around the nation that keep me invested in an activity. I really enjoy the weekends where I can travel around the U.S. and debate the best from the whole country.”
