Coming into the Georgetown season opener, Program Coordinator Mac Clabaugh was asked what “success” would look like for this weekend. 

He said, “You know, have a team or two get to Octos, have everyone win at least one round, make sure folks have a positive experience. We have a lot of folks new to regional competition, so we’ll see how it goes.” 

Well Mac…..we got a team or three to Octos….and then some! 

WUDL has an excellent overall competition, which we’ll cover shortly, but we wanted to do a special edition to cover some special accomplishments. 

BASIS DC’s Daniella Choi and Sitara Mazumdar smashed a number of league records in route to the best Travel Team results in league history, by a fair margin. 

They advanced to Octo-Finals, and beat Sidwell, a DC showdown that sent them to the “bid” round, Quarterfinals. The winner of this round would get the TOC “bid.” They faced a very talented and experienced home team, Georgetown Day, who qualified last year. The debate came down to a discussion of the merits of mutual aid, and BASIS DC emerged victorious. 

But they weren’t done yet! In a closely contested Semi-Final round against a powerful Baltimore City team that also qualified to the TOC last year, BASIS squeaked out another victory, sending them to the finals. With Mamaroneck needing to leave to get back to New York, the students agreed on “co-champions,” an excellent end to an exhilarating and by that point, exhausting weekend.  

Their success came especially on the affirmative, where they advocated for a specialized jobs program to assist those with autism who are poorly served by existing programs, and innovative, flexible negative strategies that changed to fit the affirmative. 

About the TOC

The TOC, or Tournament of Champions, is a unique competition that debaters qualify for by strength of schedule, not geography, diocese. You have to go to large, regional competitions, and do well at them to get “bids.” Different competitions have different “bid” levels based on the historic difficulty of the competition there. 

Normally, folks need 2 TOC “bids” to qualify, but there are some circumstances where a 1 “bid” team can attend. Stay tuned to see how it goes! 

We’ll see how they do at the Urban Debate Dragon in November, Veteran’s Day Weekend!