By Matthew Chan | Editor in Chief

Irvington’s debate team kicked off the year with the Northgate Invitational Tournament at Northgate High School on Sept. 12.  Even though Debate Club just started its meetings on the Tuesday before the competition, Irvington won the most trophies of any school participating that day, returning home with five trophies across the Novice and Open difficulty levels.

Irvington’s participants all competed in the Parliamentary Debate event at the tournament, defeating many of the other teams in the section.  

“What was really amazing was that because we started school later than a lot of other schools, our novice members only started learning debate on Tuesday,” explained senior Aditya Kaushik, captain of the debate team. 

The other schools in the category had already been training for several weeks because their schools started earlier.  

“Other schools have wealthier programs so they had coaches that helped them create their arguments,” continued Kaushik.

In contrast, the Novice category competitors from Irvington constructed their own arguments with their debate partners and still won many awards in their categories.

“We were not aware of the topics before, so it was definitely interesting,” said freshman Priyanka Shingwekar, a competitor on one of the winning teams. “We also weren’t allowed to use any internet connection, so we only used whatever articles from newspapers we had and our own logical reasoning.”

Irvington was not the largest school competing at Northgate but still managed to win the most awards at the tournament.  “I’m really proud of all the new members that came,” concluded Kaushik. “They really worked hard last week to prepare, and the results showed it.”