Portland is the City of Roses. Speech and Debate honored that with the Rose City Round Robin debate tournament Feb. 27 – 28.

Debate captain, junior Brian Yang, was both top speaker and tournament champion in Lincoln-Douglas debate. Sophomore Orion Cleaver advanced to semi-finals in LD debate but lost to Yang. Oregon’s top policy debater, senior Lukas Schwab, also earned a top speaker award in policy debate.

“Lincoln has had success across the board in debate this year,” coach Jenny Owen said. “I expect Lincoln to do well in debate at districts despite the fact that we are in the most competitive district in the state with the powerhouse Cleveland Cannibals; however, districts will be very challenging for us in the area of individual events given Cleveland’s breadth and depth of performance talent.”

Two tournaments, Oregon City (March 7) and National Qualifiers (March 19-21), remain before the district competition withLincoln, Cleveland, and Wilson, and hosted by Lincoln on April 2-4. Coaches will then choose competitors to compete for spots in the state championships on April 23-25.

The last tournament hosted by Lincoln was the Pirate Invitational two years ago. “Before that, I’m not sure how long it had been since Lincoln hosted a tournament aside from a day or two of the District championship,” Owen said.

Lincoln has not traditionally hosted tournaments because of the amount of dedication it takes to run one smoothly. “We thought that a debate-only event done in an alternate manner would be fun and might attract the attention of Portland-area debaters for a nearby option before districts,” Owen said. Round robins are popular tournaments in the other parts of the U.S.; some are done by invite only to top debaters in a region. We hope that our tournament increased the popularity of this format.”

Round robins are a tournament format where teams in each event are divided into pods. After the preliminary rounds, the best team in each pod advances to semi-finals, and the winners then advance to finals.

The Rose City Round Robin was unique in Oregon because it only offered debate, while most tournaments tend to include speech events as well. Originally, Owen and policy debate coaches Dylan Amos and Jake Weigler, both Lincoln alums, planned to make it an exclusively policy tournament to encourage the growth of the debate form in Oregon. They later decided to expand it to the other nationally recognized forms, Public Forum and Lincoln-Douglas, to involve more competitors.

What is often overlooked is the work that goes into making a tournament possible. “For me, the hardest part was ensuring that enough quality competitors and judges showed up to make the event meaningful and educational,” Owen said. “There’s a lot of busy work that takes place beforehand like ensuring the civic use permit for the rooms is correct, ordering awards, [and] communicating with registrants. Another important aspect to tournament success is hospitality for students, coaches and judges. Our team really stepped up to the plate and hit a home run for the RCRR by subbing in for last minute drops on little to no notice to ensure that we had enough debaters to complete our pods.”

Judges are often in short supply. At the round robin, many Lincoln competitors’ parents stepped up short notice to judge rounds for those who did not show up. “Even more impressive,” Owen said, “was a parent (Peter Wilamoski )with no connection to debate, who was at school to pick up his daughter from drama rehearsal and was coopted into judging a round of Lincoln-Douglas debate as we had no other adults in the building. He had never judged before, but after the fact said that he would be interested in helping out again.”

Results:
Lincoln-Douglas Debate
Brian Yang – Lincoln
Brandon Roth – Sprague
Semi-Finalists: Orion Cleaver – Lincoln and Rohan Hiatt – Southridge

Public Forum Debate
Michael Streinz and Edward Szczepanski – Wilson
Nimisha Kapur and Sneha Sinha – Sunset
Semi-Finalists: Lukas Garcia and Charlie Landefeld – Southridge
Bianca Pak and Sruthi Eapen – Sunset

Policy Debate
Shawn Lee and Jonathan Lee – Clackamas
Ben Brinkman and Keenan Goodman – Sam Barlow
Semi-Finalists: Laurel Eddins and Conrad Spraul – Oak Hill
Cyrus Johannes and Vikul Gupta – OES

For complete results of RCRR:
http://www.forensicstournament.net/results/1370-RCRR%202015.pdf
For complete results of Lincoln’s season:
https://sites.google.com/site/lincolnhsspeechanddebate/about-the-team/results