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Going into his senior year at Roosevelt High School, Everett Murray wanted his last high school debate season to be a competitive one.
Achieving that would be no easy feat. Roosevelt, a Title I school in the past academic year, lacks the abundant resources private schools and well-funded public ones can commit to their debate programs. Murray had a new partner this year for policy debate in fellow senior Alexandra Diaz-Arbor, and still needed to build up more debate experience himself. (Policy debate is a two-on-two debate style where students spend all year focused on a policy question, challenging students to develop research and analytical skills. This year’s topic is Arctic exploration.)
“When I talk to a lot of other people from other schools and programs, their experience with debate is a lot different, because they’re often learning from their varsity team members, and they have a lot of peers who they’re always talking to and researching with,” Murray says. “It’s kind of mostly just me at our school.”
Murray stayed up all night sometimes creating evidence sets, researching and preparing. Roosevelt’s head debate coach, Jas Liu—who’s fresh out of college—spent practice after practice debating their students and pushing their limits.
Toward the middle of the season, that work started to pay off, and Murray thought Roosevelt had a chance to be competitive. Then, in April, it hit seemingly all at once. At the two-day Urban Debate League National Championship tournament, Murray and Diaz-Arbor took home the gold.
“It’s been a magical experience to get people involved in debate and also to see and have this kind of success,” Liu says. “To see people grow on their own and become better debaters, not just because I’m there supporting them, but because they themselves are interested in it and passionate about it.”
Roosevelt’s policy team is just one recent success for the Portland Urban Debate League, a nonprofit that’s part of the broader Urban Debate League network. The national organization brings policy debate to urban public high schools around the U.S., aiming to level the playing field.
There’s still one competition left. PUDL is helping send Murray and Diaz-Arbor, along with Parkrose High School seniors Niko Glenn and Tom Huynh, to the National Speech & Debate Tournament in Richmond, Virginia in mid-June. The two teams qualified in second and first place, respectively, at national qualifiers in March.
Glenn and Huynh, in a similar vein to Murray, say they’ve certainly felt nervous about broaching the national circuit, especially given the resource disparity they’re often up against. But facing those fears and doing it anyway, Glenn says, has allowed the pair to notch wins that have bolstered their confidence.
“It’s pretty intimidating walking into a round and you see a top team in the nation with four coaches sitting around them, all on their computers typing out the arguments,” he says. “But we’re just very confident in our preparation.”
Going into nationals, both local teams are hoping to do well and represent Oregon on the big stage. Murray says he’s especially looking forward to becoming a team with his peers at Parkrose and sharing the tournament experience together.
“When you’re at nationals, all this conflict and competition in the state kind of goes away because there’s obviously a bigger battle to fight, and you end up working together,” he says. “I’m looking forward to that. I hope we do well at nationals. We have plans to, and we’re going to try our best, that’s for sure.”
