Sweepstakes Award: Benjamin Banneker

The WUDL Sweepstakes award is a grueling, challenging race to win. A team needs to show up and do well at every tournament of the season, and they need to have at least three teams do that, from September to March. You need a deep team of committed students, and you need to have a number of them be pretty good. Coach Arndt has assembled such a squad. They fielded a great Novice squad until Christmas, when they ALL advanced to JV. They have qualified a team to the UDNC, and had several others that were highly competitive. And now, they’ve won the Sweepstakes Award for the 2nd year in a row, especially a powerful signal for a team with no seniors. They’ll be a force for a long time yet to come. 

High School Team of the Year: BASIS DC

BASIS DC was on track to win Sweepstakes. They’ve got 4 Varsity teams that routinely advance to elimination rounds at regional tournaments, including two going to the ToC. They’ve got 4 other JV teams, 2 in HS and 2 in MS, plus a surging crew of new debaters that started wandering in JV by the end of the season. So…how did they not win Sweepstakes?

Banneker had a hell of a season, and BASIS’s best didn’t take the field as much as Banneker. It will be a great competition for years to come.  

Middle School Team of the Year:  Stuart Hobson

 Stuart Hobson is the only Middle School that has ever won the Sweepstakes Award, which is hard to win without at least one team consistently doing well in Varsity. Yet they were in the race for the Sweepstakes Cup until the last round of the last tournament of the season. Nevertheless, best Middle School is a great accomplishment. What used to be easy for Hobson to win has gotten more and more difficult as Eliot Hine, Oyster Adams, John Francis, Francis Hammond, and many other middle school programs have taken a step forward. Year in and year out, they graduate some great kids, and recreate the machine. 

Student Choice Awards:

American League: 

High School Team of the Year: Academy of Health Sciences

A paragon of student leadership, Chloe Mshana and Ayisha Rodriguez-Akande re-started the Academy of Health Sciences team two years ago, and are now one of the best teams in the region. They’ve got company, with AHS fielding four Varsity teams, two JV teams, and 2-3 Novice teams on a good weekend. Together with former New Coach of the Year Wilfred Sekajipo, they’ve been pushing the envelope in their argumentation, challenging the linguistic norms often accepted without question in debate and focusing their argumentation on black women (the majority of the team). They’ve won a pile of trophies at each tournament they’ve attended, and have accrued a lot of volunteer hours serving as judges. They’ve won the respect of their peers, and we’re excited to recognize them as Student Choice Team of the Year for the AL.

Middle School Team of the Year: John Francis Education Campus

Last year’s Coach of the Year, Gleeson Young, has been doing something right over in the West End. John Francis didn’t quite make the Middle School Nationals run that we’d hoped, but they still had a great season, with the team growing and recruiting some great new members of their squad. When judging a rookie round earlier this year, one young fellow stood out to me. Khalil generally added the right evidence and supported his partner’s claims in the 2AC, but in his final rebuttal, he took a deep breadth and gave a speech worth of several divisions above his Rookie status, with clear impact calculus, evidence extensions, and judge directions about what was important after everyone was done talking. Their peers seemed to have the same respect, recognizing them as the MS Team of the Year, as voted by their peers. 

National League:

High School Team of the Year: DuVal High School

Dr. Price led DuVal to Sweepstakes Cup after Sweepstakes Cup for a while, and as a result, is sad when they aren’t fielding 40 student teams that dominate all those that appear before them. The team is evolving, and returning to prominence with lots of strong recruits debating in both languages. Jose and Chris were alternates for Nationals in Español, Judah and James won Varsity awards at the last tournament, and a number of students ran across multiple divisions. 

Middle School Team of the Year:  Francis Hammond 

It is rare that first year teams are chosen by their peers as Team of the Year, but such as Francis Hammond’s debut that it was hard to ignore. They swept in and won the plurality of awards in Rookie and Novice at most of the tournaments that they attended. They almost qualified a team for Nationals, and they placed in the Sweepstakes race. The respect they earned from their opponents was well deserved along the way.