After four years, Sion revived its Debate Team with the addition of coach Caleb Westbrook to guide the new participants in their first season of Debate. He plans on teaching public speaking skills and proper ways to research topics and policies throughout the world.
Westbrook competed in speech and debate in Southwest Baptist University and has been a coach for seven years. His teaching style revolves around experiential learning and helping the students research and learn how to debate.
“While I provide the foundation for effective communication and argumentation,” Westbrook said. “It’s the students who do the research, build their cases and participate in the events.”
Many students are interested in debate as a way to get involved with Sion without doing a sport, and it helps underclassmen get acclimated to the Sion community while also learning valuable life skills such as public speaking.
“I thought it would be a good skill to have as someone who is interested in law as a possible future profession and it seemed like a fun extracurricular activity to try out as a freshman,” freshman Vivi Lukas said. “I hope to build a toolbox of skills like public speaking and being able to respond to rebuttals.”
Sports at Sion are very popular as a way to participate in the community, and by adding a new extracurricular it helps students who have different interests get involved.
“I’m excited for having a space to talk about current world events and a place to argue in healthy ways,” sophomore Abby Gural said. “It’s like how people put frustration into sports, I put mine into my debates and speeches.”
By learning about real world political policies and ideas and how to have a healthy argument, these skills will help students prepare for their future careers.
“The career I want to go into is going to have a heavy focus on discussion of policies and debate of ideas. I thought that it would be important for me to have a basic knowledge of debate, especially because I might want to participate in recreational debate in college,” senior Greta Grossman said. “Ever since I was little I’ve wanted to do debate and I’m excited that we have it here now.”
Throughout the season, the team has learned the different forms of debate as well as how to structure arguments, find evidence, and research the topics given to them. As tournaments get closer, the practices will be more focused into smaller groups to prepare for future tournaments throughout the season.
“First-year speech and debate team members compete in novice tournaments, rather than varsity tournaments, against other beginners, so it allows everyone to ease into public speaking instead of immediately getting thrown into the fire against highly experienced opponents,” Westbrook said.
Though the season is off to a great start, the team is limited on the amount of time they are given to practice, as they only practice twice a week for 45 minutes.
“In the future, I hope that we have an elective speech and debate class, increase the number of students in the program, compete in more events and qualify for the national tournament,” Westbrook said. “That is what we are aiming toward in the future, but as a new program, we have to take things one step at a time.”
Many students hope to gain useful life skills such as reliable research, public speaking and how to stay informed on real world issues from Debate. As the program grows, students are excited to get real world experience that will help them in college and future careers.
“I’m excited to gain more knowledge about the prompts because they’re about real world scenarios that we actually research about the news,” junior Surriya Quddus said. “I’m excited to meet new people from different schools and learn about public speaking.”
