By Rick Vacek | June 12, 2024
It’s easy to measure the dedication required of a college debate team.
It’s much more difficult to size up the research and note-taking required before the competition even begins.
“You have to have a graduate-level understanding of the topic every year,” said Scott Herndon, director of debate at The University of Texas at Dallas. “You’ve researched the heck out of it. You’ve debated it the entire season. You’ve watched it innovate. You’ve waited for new articles to be published. You find crazy ways to say things to keep it interesting and fresh.
“You give yourself a strategic advantage by doing a ton of research – I’d estimate we’ve done nearly a terabyte this year.”
And that might be conservative.
“I thought we did more than a terabyte,” said Hasan Mubarak, one of just two seniors on this year’s UT Dallas Debate Team. “I’m learning things that experts in the field would be doing – very detailed law reviews or policy proposals. We have to understand every single facet.”
For the 22nd consecutive year, the team’s ability to understand all those details and deliver them effectively qualified UT Dallas for the American Forensic Association’s prestigious National Debate Tournament (NDT).
It also is Herndon’s 22nd year with the team, the last 12 as director.
“We’re still on the same model we were on 22 years ago,” he said. “A small force of dedicated people can get a lot of stuff done. We’ll outwork you, if that’s what it takes. I love that that’s what they’re all about.”
Mubarak and his debate team partner, Storm Lasseter, didn’t qualify for the NDT, but only because of senior commitments they had to fulfill on campus.
They won more than 60% of their debates this year, a first in team history, and reached the Sweet 16 of the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) National Championship. Lasseter was voted the 21st overall speaker, and Mubarak was named to the CEDA All-American Debate Team.
The pair also joined four members of Comet Speech and Forensics on a trip to Ireland for the International Forensics Association (IFA) tournament. There, they learned the intricacies of British parliamentary debate, which Herndon compared to having tennis players compete in a pickleball tournament.
Their success meant a lot to Erik Mathis, assistant director of debate. Mubarak and Lasseter were among the first students he met after he came to UT Dallas in 2019 – he has known Herndon for more than two decades, ever since he was a college debater and Herndon was a judge.
“Making sure they went out on a high note was one of my goals this year,” Mathis said.
It is not a task for the faint of heart – and heart is the operative word. Team members report to the debate room in Founders Building just about every day, and Mathis is right there with them.
“We’ve put goals in front of them that challenge them to become better debaters,” he said. “They’ve had a lot of success because they’ve decided to work. It’s a lot of hours.”
Said Mubarak, “I’d say it’s just a matter of our dedication, our willingness to come to the office every single day, put in the hard hours to do the research and do practice speeches. We have a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life on our team. That not only helps us understand each other, it also speaks to how accepting the UTD debate community is at helping each individual debater find their individual voice.”
Mubarak and Lasseter are typical of many students in speech and debate. They both found their voices in high school.
“I was a very shy, nervous, underconfident kid,” Mubarak said. “I think debate has helped me in a lot of ways to find my own voice and learn the art of arguments. I’ve learned a lot about how to more confidently communicate with people, how to persuade people to understand my point of view and also how to understand other people’s counterarguments to my perspective.
“Debate was the one place where people had to listen to me and had to understand my arguments if they wanted to beat me.”
Lasseter said he was so shy back then, “I couldn’t communicate with people. I couldn’t even ask for a pencil.” He stumbled into debate only because it was on his list of electives.
“I had no idea what it was like. I thought I was going to debate whether video games are good for kids,” he said.
But then he tried it. It changed him.
“I like arguing. I think I have a presence,” he said. “I have a good voice, I feel like. A lot of people said I was just a different person in debate.”
But that doesn’t mean competing on the debate stage came easily for either one.
“When I got into that debate team, I thought I knew a lot, and I didn’t know anything,” Lasseter said.
Mubarak, meanwhile, struggled for a while to not get stressed by the experience: “Learning that skill really gets you thinking on your feet. How can you be clever about it? How can you be witty and figure out ways to turn the debate around?”
It’s all about the preparation. When they aren’t in front of the judges, the debaters are furiously taking notes as their opponents present their arguments.
In a process called flowing, a combination of shorthand and mapping, the idea is to scribble down what the opponents said, then dial up some of that copious research and write a rebuttal idea next to it during the five to eight minutes between speeches.
“We spend a lot of time working on that,” Mathis said. “We’ve already been prepping speeches, so they know electronically where to find files.”
Both seniors talked about how much they will miss their debate challenges. Mubarak, a molecular biology major at UT Dallas, next will immerse himself in UTHealth Houston’s McGovern Medical School, while Lasseter will apply his bachelor’s degree in political science to a master’s in communications at Baylor University.
But Lasseter also plans to do something else at Baylor – help coach the debate team. He hopes to make it like his UT Dallas experience, which he will remember fondly:
“We trust each other. We’re like a family. We’re very welcoming. We care for each other. We hang out with each other outside the tournaments or the debate room. We’re not strangers to each other outside debate.”
All that hard work brings them together. It’s worth noting.