This past weekend, groggy students gathered at 6:30 AM at the Wendy’s in Petworth, even earlier than they’d have been up for school. While the Chicken Parm sandwich and the French Toast sticks are appealing, that wasn’t their draw on this particular morning. 

That morning, they were piling into a 54 passenger bus to drive up to New York for a large, regional debate tournament featuring competition from across the Mid-Atlantic and North East, and folks as far away as Ohio and Chicago. 

We picked up additional debaters at CMIT North in route NE along the highway, and hit the road. It was smooth sailing and sleepy kids until we stopped short of our initial destination, the Biden Rest Stop at Delaware House, long a traditional pit stop for the WUDL Travel Team and the place where folks get coffee and pivot from sleep to preparation when we head north. 

The delay was caused by a high speed chase, the result of a carjacking that closed the highway in both directions. Eventually able to make a U-Turn, we got an exciting tour of rural Delaware before hitting the road once again. After a quick lunch, where we collected WUDL alumna Zara Escobar, who had taken the train over from Yale to help out, we finally made it to the tournament. 

For some context, we had originally entered about half our teams in the JV Division, given their comparatively lesser experience, but the tournament collapsed the JV division into Varsity with little warning, so most of our teams opted to jump into the deep end (Varsity) instead of not go (something we’d already paid for). 

At the end of Friday night, WUDL was rolling. We had a winning record as a league, with at least 8 teams undefeated so far. Saturday was tough, 4 more rounds of preliminary debates followed by an elimination round that night. Facing off against the best and brightest the debate community has to offer, WUDL held their own. 

Every team won at least one round, and the floor was raised, with an unprecedented number of teams breaking even. While we didn’t advance to elimination rounds, we’re proud of the process and how many teams were close. We were led this weekend by William and Zahra from School Without Walls, a freshman/sophomore partnership that has extensive middle school debate experience.   

On Sunday, after the tournament was over, we stopped over in NYC for some exploration on the way home. We went to an authentic Dim Sum restaurant in Chinatown, then walked down Broadway to the 9-11 Memorial at Freedom Plaza and finally to Battery Park where we could see Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. 

Huge shout out to WUDL alums who came with us as chaperones and judges. We couldn’t have done it without you.

• Alexa Figueroa (Northwestern, now coaching College Park Academy), 
• Emmanuel Makinde (Flowers, now coaching McKinley Tech), 
• Eric Clarke (Columbia Heights, now coaching School Without Walls),
• Joyce Banjo (Douglas, now coaching DC International), and 
• Zara Escobar (helping out in the New Haven UDL while at Yale)