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The Rice Thresher
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by Susan Abramski thresher staff The forensics team held onto its title of best speech and debate team in the country at the Pi Kappa Delta National Tournament and Convention held at Boise State University March 28-31. Debate Coach Dan West said the tournament is important because it offers an overall title in speech and debate rather than just one. "We are a complete team," Hanszen College junior Brook Ames, president of the George R. Brown Forensics Society, said "For a lot of schools, they focus either on just debate or they focus on just speaking, whereas we have all these students that can do very well at both, which is evidenced by the overall title." In addition to the overall championship, Rice debaters received 50 awards in other categories, including the national championship titles in dramatic interpretation by Sid Richardson College sophomore Bernadette Cadena, reader's theater and poetry interpretation by Brown College junior Chas Cahn and persuasive speaking by Lovett College junior Jitu Sardar. In addition to the Pi Kappa Delta National Tournament, the team participated in a debate competition at the National Parliamentary Debate Association Championship Tournament at Metropolitan State College of Denver from March 22-26. "What's nice about the debate tournament is that we went from 14th last year to 4th this year," West, a Brown resident associate, said. "We made a big jump." West, who has been coaching forensics at Rice for eight years, said there were over 250 teams of partners at the competition, including five from Rice. "We had our van accident last year on the way home from debate nationals," West said. "I started this year with only three debaters returning from the year before that chose to debate again. I had to rebuild the debate program. So I spent most of my energy trying to rebuild that." Ames said the team recruited some strong freshmen, including four who qualified for the American Forensics Association National Forensics Tournament. "We need to improve our speech ranking. ... I spent so much time trying to rebuild the debate program with so few of them coming back after the accident that I didn't focus enough energy on coaching the speech events that I do," West said. The team's place at speech nationals, which were held last weekend at George Mason University in Virginia, dropped from 14th place last year to 20th place this year. "So I think that next year, now that my debate team is back together, I can spend more time coaching speech events. ...20th place is still not bad out of 100 schools," West said. Ames said his goals for the team next year include defending the national title, continuing a winning streak at the fall state championships, retaining all current team members, recruiting aggressively among incoming freshmen and retaining and improving the current standings. West said Cahn will represent Rice this weekend at the last tournament of the season, the Interstate Oratory in California.
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