On April 30th, Deerfield hosted its annual parliamentary debate. While Andover won the debate, twelve representatives of Groton’s Debating Society managed a strong showing of fifth place out of nineteen schools. Eight of the twelve students who attended were in the novice division, making Groton’s place all the more impressive. The team of Oliver Ye ’20, Joshua Guo ’20, Leo McMahon ‘19 and Powers Trigg ’20 placed second in the novice division. The debate, which has been attended by Groton for the last twenty-five years, hosted one hundred and sixty students from nineteen different schools, including one in Canada.

The debate’s style was parliamentary extemporaneous, meaning that debate topics remained unknown to participants until shortly after arrival. Topics varied vastly – race’s role in the Oscars, sanctuary cities, the roots of juvenile delinquency, and North Korea were all fair game. Erin Dollard ‘20, who debated with the advance team, believes the variety of topics was a highlight of the debate: “I really liked the diversity of the resolutions; each round you have three topics to choose from. The resolutions were pretty relevant because a lot of them touched on issues that are going on right now.” With such a broad range of resolutions, students with a survey knowledge of current events and societal institutions were positioned to succeed. Leo McMahon ’19, a novice in the debate, commented that Groton had a significant advantage in that its “novices were more knowledgeable about facts and procedures.”

For two Groton students, Deerfield was a first step into the Debating Society. While placing fifth overall is slightly under Groton’s usual performance at interscholastic debates, doing so with a comparative lack of experience showed the strength of the Debating Society will remain for some years. “The Third Formers did very well at this debate, and so the Society should be competitive in the coming years. Afran Ali ’20, Cara Chang ‘20, and Powers Trigg ‘20 were all undefeated over their individual rounds of debating,” said Dr. Reyes.

The Deerfield Debate is also the last interscholastic debate of the year; its coincidence with the beginning of two weeks of Advanced Placement testing allows for “the older debaters [to] tend to step back, and [for] the younger debaters take over.” said Debating Society Advisor Andy Reyes. Such a robust interest in debate among younger students means that the Debating Society has much to look forward to in the years to come.