Over the past couple of seasons, the Petal High Speech and Debate Team has put on impressive performances at competitions around the country, with showings at the Harvard National Invitational Forensics Tournament, the Delores Taylor Arthur School World Schools Invitational, and the Navy and Gold Debate and Speech Exhibition.
This week, the team is heading back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the Harvard World Schools Invitational, in which four members of the Petal team will compete against students from the United States and countries including Uganda, Denmark, China and Canada.
“These are some top boarding schools from around the world,” Petal team coach Kelly Garner said. “Instead of going against, say, 300 schools from around the United States, it’s a smaller field, but it’s more prestigious schools, and it’s global.
“Ever since World Schools started in 2015, this has been a long-range goal of mine, to put World Schools teams together.”
The Petal team – which is made of 11th-grader Raburn Paris and 12th-graders Nathan Marx, Max Garner and Thomas Sanchez – will be the only team competing from the southeastern United States. They will go up against U.S. schools including Thunder Ridge High School in Idaho; The Ivy Plus from Arizona; and The Hockaday School from Texas.
International teams include Black Pine from Ontario, Canada; Peterhouse Boys from Zimbabwe, Africa; Kiira College Butiki from Uganda, Africa; and Point Avenue from Ha Noi, Vietnam.
“It’s super exciting,” Garner said. “We really have a lot going on here at Petal, and I’ve seen that our kids can hold their own against anybody else. That’s what’s exciting about going to even national tournaments, because it’s a lot of breaking the stereotype about what people in general think of the South.
“Earlier in the year, we went up against a lot of Canadian teams, and they said, ‘We didn’t even know Mississippi was a state – we thought it was just a river.’ But by the time the kids left, they had made these life-long friendships and realized they were all very similar. I think that’s the unique thing about debate, is that we can get kids from early ages to meet from all over. I think we could solve a lot of the world’s problems, or at least erase a lot of the stereotypes.”
During the three-day Harvard World Schools Invitational, students will take part in prepared motions, in which they are made aware of which topics will be debated in certain rounds. That concept is opposed to the one used in regular debate tournaments, where one topic is debated for the duration of the event.
The World Schools event also will feature “impromptu rounds,” in which students will be given one hour to debate a topic.
“They can’t use any connectivity – no Internet, no computer,” Garner said. “All they can have to do this round is a World Almanac and a dictionary, so it’s a lot of fun.
“Coaches can’t weigh in on any of that – we can’t even be in the room while they’re prepping. We just have to have a lot of practice sessions so they kind of know how to handle those impromptu motions.”
Because Garner has been working with some of the members of the debate team since they were in middle school, she thinks the team is in good shape to make a showing at the debate.
“Three of them, I’ve been working with for quite some time, and the fourth man on my team, I actually coached his sister in debate when he was 2 or 3 years old,” she said. “And my own child has been a big push, because he’s a senior this year, and I’ve been working with kids in his class since the fifth grade.
“So they all have a lot of debate experience. From here, hopefully with some good results, maybe sometime before I retire I can get kids to an international tournament – that’s a long-range goal.”
