Bringing home the gold
Members of the Mountain Brook Junior High speech and debate team brought home a national championship trophy and numerous individual awards from the recent National Tournament in Fort Lauderdale.
Rising ninth-graders Jane Grey Battle and Claire Lauterbach emerged as national champions in middle school public forum debate from a pool of 95 teams at the competition, held June 20-22. The topic of debate centered around the merits of keeping the North American Free Trade Agreement intact.
Lauterbach said she couldn’t believe it when they were announced as the winners.
“It took me a good 20 minutes of repeatedly checking with my partner to make sure it had actually happened before I finally fully understood that we had won,” Lauterbach said.
The duo competed in 11 debate rounds over three days en route to the championship. They went 5-1 in their six preliminary matches to earn the number six seed in the bracket and a victory over a team from China in the quarterfinals as they made it to the final round.
In the championship round, the duo had to debate why the U.S. should not participate in NAFTA, against the team of Tim Jing and Derrick Cai from Joaquin Miller Middle School in California. Battle said she was definitely nervous going into the final round.
“Seeing almost a hundred people in the room and the big video camera was nerve-wracking. My hands were shaking so much I had to re-flip the coin [toss] four times because it kept landing on my backpack and my opponents’ backpack,” she said. “Thankfully, once I was a minute into my case, my adrenaline kicked in and the butterflies went away.”
Lauterbach said the final round was one of the most difficult rounds out of the whole tournament. She said she completed the round feeling like it could go either way. However, the duo performed exceptionally well and won with a unanimous decision from the five-judge panel.
For Battle, this championship was a culmination of a year’s worth of determination. Last year, she participated in the national tournament held in Birmingham. She said after that experience, she was determined to come back and win the championship.
“Everyone told me it was virtually impossible,” she said. “So, in the moment, I think it was really hard for me to understand that I was actually there on stage in front of a thousand people being announced, along with Claire, as the national champions — that I had reached my goal that no one thought I would actually reach.”
In addition to bringing home a national championship, other members of the team also had great success. Rising eighth-grader Christian Glenos and rising ninth-grader Jack Sansbury competed against 73 other students in the Lincoln Douglas division, on the topic of whether the U.S. use of targeted killing in foreign countries is unjust. They both advanced to the top 16 and Glenos received recognition at the awards ceremony for being the fourth best speaker in that division.
Head coach Elizabeth Wood-Weas said the team’s achievements this summer have not just been an individual effort.
“Our program shines for one reason: teamwork. We have a culture of sharing files, peer coaching and parent and alumni support,” said Wood-Weas. “Without those three things, we wouldn’t have reached this level of success”.
Even with the great performance at the national tournament, Wood-Weas said the team is already gearing up for next season.
“The day that the national tournament ended, the debate topics for the upcoming school year came out and students began researching before we were home,” she said.