Many times, high school teams’ biggest games or tournaments are the ones that require traveling to major cities, usually including an exciting plane ride that’ll only happen once or maybe twice a year if they’re lucky. By this standard, the Jesuit debate team had an enormously important month of November, traveling to major tournaments at the Notre Dame High School in California, Glenbrook’s High School in Chicago, and also one just down the road at Hockaday. Debating for three straight weekends, the Jesuit team stayed in LA from November 7 to 9, debated at Hockaday from November 13 to 14, and went to Chicago from November 20 to 23.
To kick off the month of November, top members of the team traveled to Notre Dame High School in Belmont, CA for a national level tournament against 100 of the top teams in the nation. One of our best debate teams, consisting of Joe Hall ’16 and Jake LoRocco ’17, were specially invited to partake in a 14 team round robin tournament taking place two days prior to the ND tourney, getting two big debates out of a single plane ticket. Debate coach Dan Lingel thought this invitation was “very cool because nobody from Jesuit had ever been invited to it before,” making Lingel optimistic about Joe and Jake’s potential to perform extraordinarily well this season. After their invitational tournament, the other Jesuit teams arrived in Belmont for the Notre Dame tournament. The dynamic duo of Joe and Jake did amazingly well, making it to the elimination round but losing in their first elimination debate. Despite the early elimination, this finish still put the team in the top 20 of the 100 schools at the tourney, a fantastic finish for them. According to Coach Lingel, this performance indicated that “Joe and Jake have nudged their way into a spot as a top 40 team in the country,” a phenomenal national ranking for a team this early in the season.
The next weekend at Hockaday, every member of the Jesuit debate team and every faculty member that helps coach the team came to the tournament, a total of 28 attendees, making it the “largest number it has ever been” in veteran coach Dan Lingel’s 22 years of experience. Jesuit had 6 varsity teams and 5 novice teams competing, and the remaining 2 varsity teams helped their teammates. Two of Jesuit’s varsity teams, seniors Ethan Tsao and Praneeth Kalva and juniors Beomhak Lee and Alandro Valdez, gathered all their points required to qualify for the state championship tournament. Tsao and Kalva went undefeated in the prelims, winning 5 straight matches, but ultimately losing in the quarterfinal round to a Greenhill team. Valdez and Lee also did well, going 4-1 in the prelims and advancing to the quarterfinals matches, but losing to the Greenhill team as well.
Along with the varsity competitors’ success at Hockaday, Jesuit’s novice debaters did very well at the tournament. Freshmen Pete Weigman and Jack Griffiths went undefeated in the prelims, winning all five matchups, with another team going 4-1, and the three other novice teams going 3-2. Three of the novice teams advanced on to the elimination rounds. The young team of Weigman and Griffiths made it all the way to the final match but lost to a team from Highland Park. “This year’s freshman have been amazing,” said Lingel. He stated, “10 different freshmen have made it to the elimination rounds at least once.” At the Hockaday tournament less than 2 miles away from Jesuit, the debate team “took over an entire commons area and made a makeshift little war room. There was such great energy and interaction amongst all the team,” noted Coach Lingel.
And for their last tournament of the month, 3 varsity Jesuit teams traveled to Glenbrook’s High School in Chicago for the largest national debate tournament in the fall semester with 200 teams from 35 different states. Doing well in the tournament was extremely difficult because only 32 of the 200 teams made it to the elimination rounds. Unfortunately, all three of the Jesuit teams finished the prelims with a 4-3 record, which is good, but still underneath the required record of 5-2 to make it to the elimination. Lingel stated that “We were a little disappointed by Joe and Jake because they’re on the precipice of being in the top 40 teams in the country. But it was still a good weekend overall.”
Stayed tuned to the Roundup for more coverage of the Jesuit Debate team as they prepare for the spring tournaments and try to make some national noise!
