The jackhammers pounded away as the city resurfaced the road outside the school, and inside the school as workers put the finishing touches on the renovations of Oyster Adams’ Upper Campus (very beautiful, more accessible, and a lot larger than their previous historic building). 

In the classroom, we had debaters under construction. This event brought together more than 100 students from 20 schools across the region for a WUDL first — a pre-season workshop. 

We’ve never hosted one of these before — folks either went to the Matthew Harris Ornstein Summer Debate Institute,  or they didn’t, and the competitive season started. Many other UDLs around the nation have been offering workshops lately, and we’ve taken a feather out of their book with this new programmatic offering. 

Our team sat down and identified 5 key things we wanted to folks to get out of this event: 

• Taking Notes and Flowing
• Cross Examination
• Intro to Debate Strategy, Speech times, etc. 
• Introduce the Arctic Topic
• Speaking and actual debating

Thus, every student was assigned to a group, and rotated through these 5 core courses, graduating ready to participate in their first tournament. 

Alongside the student workshops, we were able to run a coaches workshop, training more than 20 new or relatively inexperienced coaches from schools across the region. 

Huge shout out to Coaches Fortuna, Plaisted, and Crump, WUDL AB Members Matt Rose, Eric Clarke, and Jackson Erpenbach, and new volunteer Ozan Ergungor for joining our staff as instructors this weekend. 

Also thanks to WUDL Varsity debaters Ian, Rohan, Addie, Claudia, Henry, Sitara, Reagan, Zeve, and Chloe for serving as TAs and guest instructors this past weekend. 

Stay tuned for some DCTV coverage of the event!