Stuy S&D Weekly Update: 1/24/23

Dear Speech and Debate Family,

Welcome to the first weekly update of the Stuyvesant Speech & Debate team! Going forward, we will send an email every Monday/Tuesday with tournament results, important reminders, and other highlights from the team. On our website, you will be able to find all the weekly updates, team photos, tournament schedules, and permission slips/forms. Make sure to bookmark the website—this will be an important resource for this year!

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Team Updates

Policy: In policy debate, our novices competed over the weekend at the Online Policy League! Our teams excelled, with Stuyvesant KS (Rahul Kissoon + Kassandra Sinchi) placing first, Stuy CD (Vincent Chen + Amrit Dad) placing seventh, and Stuy VZ (Aruna Vaithilingam + Ziying Zhang) placing eighth! In speaker awards, Rahul placed third, Vincent placed seventh, Amrit placed ninth, Kassandra placed tenth, and Ziying placed fourteenth. It was a great start to the new year!

Public Forum:

In public forum, we had four teams advance to elimination rounds at our last tournament at Ridge, with Stuyvesant LB (Jasmine Liang + Solomon Binyaminov) championing the novice division! We’ve since shifted gears to researching West Asia to prepare for our January national competition at Columbia University!

Lincoln Douglas:

Over the past few months, Lincoln Douglas has competed at 7 tournaments team-wide. Most recently, we went to the Ridge Debate, where we won 6 awards in total. Shoutout to Lauren Chin, Henry Ji, Yuna Lee, and Benjamin Huang for advancing into the elimination rounds. In speaker awards, Henry placed first for Open LD, and Galvin placed fifth in the novice division. We’re looking forward to the tournament at Columbia this weekend, in which we’ll be debating the new topic "Resolved: Justice requires open borders for human migration"!

Congress:

A flurry of snow at the Sr. Raimonde Tournament at Regis and Loyola accompanied a flurry of success for the Congressional debate team, with junior Pulindu Weerasekara (2nd place) and sophomore Jiawen Lin (6th place) receiving their second half-qualification for states, and both junior varsity Daniel Prizant and novice Malka Lubelski breaking to finals! At the January 13th BDL, novices Sebastian Tecza and Matthew Dong both placed in the top 10, and junior Sarah Diaz won the tournament, receiving a half-qualification for states. The team now has four members qualified for the NYSFL State Tournament this April, with juniors William Tang and Olivia Woo completing their half-qualifications at the Regis Christmas Classic last December. The team is excited for their upcoming February national tournaments—University of Pennsylvania and Harvard!

Parliamentary:

Parliamentary Debate has been lively with plenty of tournaments! At Ridge, Stuy RT (Hannah Riegel and Molly Carrol Thompson) championed the tournament, Stuy BY (Henry Bansbach and Jerry Yang) made it to semi-finals, Stuy AH (Adrian Turkedjiev and Julian Huang) made it to quarter-finals, and Stuy AF (Zeke Abramowicz and Lar Foster) made it to novice semi-finals. At our most recent tournament NYPDL January, Stuy TT (Adrian Turkedjiev and Everett Torrey) made it to semi-finals. We are excited to continue practicing to prepare for our upcoming tournaments in February!

Speech:

In Speech, we shone at the Sister Raimonde Tournament at Regis-Loyola on 1/14. Audrey Hilger and Arshia Mazumder placed first and second respectively in Dramatic Performance — a Stuy podium! In public address events, Eli Lifton placed fourth in Declamation, and Eshaal Ubaid was the Original Oratory champion! In Oral Interpretation, Ariana Lin placed ninth and Prajusha Azeem placed second in Junior Varsity, while in Varsity, Erica Liu placed 2nd.

Overall, it was an incredible performance, and we look forward to doing even better at the UPenn and Harvard invitationals in February.

Extemp:

The extemp team has seen many half-qualifications at local tournaments recently! 6 members are now fully qualified for states (Aleksey O., Ashley L., Eshaal U., Justin H., Kai Xuan L., Myles V.) with many more who are almost there. Varsity has been tirelessly working since the start of the year to prep for upcoming national tournaments at UPenn and Harvard, with four dedicated upperclassmen (Unique Z., Eshaal U., Isaac H., Mason N.) along with TWO novices set to compete in the former (shoutout to Ashley L. and Myles V.)! We also shout out all of the upperclassmen who have poured in hours every single week to run sessions and train—excited for the upcoming season climax!

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Thank you for reading!

That’s it for this update, and if you found it interesting, feel free to share it with friends/family! If you have any questions, please respond to this email (or contact stuy4n6@gmail.com), and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

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