Dear Speech and Debate members and families,
Welcome back to the Stuyvesant Speech & Debate team weekly update! Over the weekend, several of our teams participated in a highly anticipated in-person tournament hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. For some, this marked their first experience in an overnight competition, and we are excited to report that they rose to the challenge and made us all very proud.
This email does not include all the team pictures, so if you would like to see more, you can find all of them at the bottom of the home page of our website. You can also find all the weekly updates, tournament schedules, permission slips/forms, and the donation page on our website as well.
Before we go into the team updates, we would like to make a quick request. The Stuyvesant Speech & Debate team is a partially school-funded program that relies heavily on the generosity of our families, alumni, and friends to keep running. If you are able to, we would greatly appreciate a donation to our team, no matter how big or small. Your support will help us cover the cost of tournament fees (for national tournaments like UPenn and Harvard), travel expenses (for transportation and overnight stay), and other necessary supplies. You can find the donation page on our website. Thank you for your continued support!
Now, onto the team updates!
Team Updates
Policy:
In policy debate, our debaters had the pleasure of competing at UPenn this weekend with Rahul Kissoon and Kassandra Sinchi (Stuyvesant KS) making it all the way to Quarters! Stuyvesant CV (Niki Chen and Adrian Veto) also fought a hard bubble round to come in 9th seed. Additionally, our JV teams got some great in-person debate experience with Stuyvesant FW (Seth Fenton and Yucheng Wang) taking 13th seed, Stuyvesant BF (Salioudian Barry and Atiya Firooz) taking 14th seed, and Stuyvesant JK (Johnathan Jiang and Faiyaz Khan) taking 15th. Huge congratulations to all of our debaters who put in so much hard work!
Public Forum:
Public forum debate had a wonderful time at UPenn! Helen Mancini and Astrid Harrington made it to varsity double-octofinals, and Annie Li and Elijah Choi made it to novice quarterfinals, where Annie was 4th place speaker. We’re looking forward to Harvard next week!
Lincoln Douglas:
LD went to UPenn! It was a few of our novice’s first tournaments, and we’re incredibly proud of them. They all worked really hard and enjoyed their experience, and the team had a great time at UPenn. Galvin had a 3-2 record, Rayen was 17th speaker, and Lauren made it to quarter-finals and placed 7th in speaker awards! We’re so grateful for this experience and can’t wait for Harvard national tournament next week!
Congress:
Stuy Congress had a wonderful weekend competing at UPenn! Senior Oscar Zhou, juniors Sarah Diaz, Olivia Woo, and Pulindu Weerasekara, sophomores Alexa Pikramenos and Jiawen Lin, and freshman Timothy Louie attended, with Olivia and Alexa breaking into the semifinals! This was our team’s first overnight tournament, so along with the late-night prepping, it was an amazing opportunity for team bonding, with several team dinners, snack runs, and other festivities. Although UPenn is now off the books, the team is still off and running, with the Harvard Invitational next week!
Parliamentary:
Parli participated at NYPDL February this weekend with 2 hybrid teams. Adrian Turkedjiev and Molly Carroll Thompson’s team made it to octos, Hannah Riegel’s hybrid team made it to semis, and Henry Bansbach’s hybrid team made it to semis as well. Molly also placed 6th in speaker awards. Congrats to the Stuy Parli debaters for doing incredibly this weekend!
Speech:
Speech performed incredibly well at UPenn, in all sorts of events. In Duo Interpretation, the pair of Ethan Khosh and Audrey Hilger placed 5th, a finalist placement. In Oral Interpretation, Renae Leung was a quarterfinalist and Melia Moore placed 6th in finals, earning a bid to the Tournament of Champions. In Original Oratory, Eshaal Ubaid made it to the semi-finals. In Humorous Interpretation, we had two finalists: Ethan Khosh in 5th place, and, earning a bid to the Tournament of Champions, Audrey Hilger in 1st place! This was the first invitational for many speakers, and we look forward to doing just as well, and hopefully even better, at Harvard this weekend!
Extemp:
Extemp performed very well at UPenn this weekend! Despite tough competition, every single extemper sent was at the upper half of preliminary rankings, and our quarter-finalists (Ashley L., Eshaal U., Justin H., Kai L., Mason N.) made up one-THIRD of the entire pool that round. Shout-out to Justin for getting to semis and Eshaal for winning 4th overall (and getting to semis in oratory as well)!
Thank you for taking the time to read this update! We hope you found it informative and enjoyable. If you liked this update, please consider sharing it with your friends and family who may also be interested.
If you have any questions or would like to provide feedback, don't hesitate to reach out to us by responding to this email or contacting stuy4n6@gmail.com. We will make sure to get back to you as soon as possible.
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