Battle of the Minds!

On February 1st, four cadets from our debate team entered into the SCISA Debate Tournament in the novice category. At the start of the year, the cadets in the debate team were told they would have an in-house end of semester debate to determine who would be selected for the SCISA tournament as only up to four could enter into a category. The four cadets selected to go were determined through team scores calculated by a panel of teachers who volunteered to judge our in-house tournament.  The four cadets who were able to attend the event were Gabriel Berger-Slowinski, Sean Prater, Tyler Willson, and Matthew Wong. 

The cadets were divided into two teams of two, and at the start of the semester, SCISA announced the resolution that teams would be debating on. This year’s resolution was as follows: “The US will substantially reduce military aid to Taiwan.” As soon as the resolution was announced the four cadets got to work on researching both the pros and cons of this resolution, and prepared their arguments. They practiced their arguments many times, both in and out of dedicated club time, writing and rewriting their debates several times. Even though the four of them would be split into two teams, they still pooled together their resources and helped each other determine their arguments. When it finally came time for the tournament, they competed in five twenty to thirty minute rounds, not knowing if they would argue for the pro side or the con side until the start of each round. At the end of the competition it was announced that Camden Military Academy Team A, cadets Tyler Willson and Matthew Wong, had won the novice level tournament! To add to this achievement, Cadet Willson also won the award for  Top Individual Scorer in his category! This was all four cadets’ first year debating, and they did phenomenally. Congratulations to all four of them and congratulations to our two winners!

Next year, Matthew Wong and Sean Prater will be leading the debate team and competing on the varsity level. We look forward to what they will achieve next year!

– CPT Matthew Shields (Instructor & Debate Team Faculty Head)