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There is a very large trophy lying on its side underneath Calista Woo’s desk. Woo, a 16-year-old rising senior at Mountain View High School, won first place in a major debate event at the National Speech and Debate Tournament in Iowa last month, but she still is not quite sure what to do with the trophy.
“It’s the people in the community who have expressed some level of pride that feels really special. And I think that was the actual win from the whole experience,” Woo said.
Hosted by the National Speech and Debate Association, the tournament brought together thousands of high school students to compete in various speech and debate events over five days in June.
The Mountain View Los Altos Union High School District’s speech and debate team usually sends a few students to the tournament every year. But it never has had a first-place winner until now, said MVLA Head Coach Julie Herman.
Woo clinched the top prize in Lincoln-Douglas, a one-on-one debate style that has a prepared topic given to students ahead of the competition. This year, the event had 16 rounds and 279 high school students who participated in it. Students qualify for the event from prior competitions, Herman said, adding that about 10,000 students compete in Lincoln-Douglas debate nationwide.
To make it to nationals is always a big achievement for MVLA, where resources are more limited than at other schools. The students do their own fundraising to get to the tournament and don’t have private coaches helping them along the way, Herman said.
“They’re up against different odds than students who are at private institutions who have access to a lot more resources kind of directly handed to them,” Herman said.
Woo credited a lot of her success at nationals to a dedicated work ethic that was nurtured by supportive coaches and teammates. “Everything is such a process of a community,” she said.
But Woo also recognized some of the challenges of getting to the tournament. Initially she did not qualify, but was able to make up for the loss in another competition.
Preparing for the tournament also was a struggle, Woo said. Mountain View High School gets out for the summer in early June, later than other schools. Woo had less than two weeks to research her topic after school ended, while other students had nearly a month, she said.
To compensate for the time crunch, Woo spent the lead-up to the tournament on her computer from 9 a.m. to 4 a.m. every day. “I was just kind of reading articles, cutting articles, talking about how I don’t want to read more articles. It was kind of a blur for a week. And then there were some practice rounds with some of my friends,” Woo said.
Woo spent a lot of time practicing with a friend who attends Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose. He also qualified for the tournament and ended up reaching the final round, where he lost to Woo and took second place in the competition.
“They wrote their cases together, and they worked together to kind of map out what rebuttals, what the strategy for the round looks like. So, I think that was particularly impressive that whatever it was that they were doing together rose to the top of the whole country’s competition,” Herman said.
For her part, Woo said that winning the event was not the initial focus of her hard work. She wanted to make it through the early rounds, but then the goal kept shifting as she advanced further and further in the competition. The idea was to give it her all and if she did that, then she would be fine losing to a good debater, Woo said.
“I never wanted to be on that final stage in that specific room in a suit mic’d up and all. All I knew is that I wanted to do my best,” she said.
While appreciative of the success, Woo noted that it was a stressful year of intense competition and not one that she wants to repeat. She would have liked to have enjoyed the tournaments more, she said.
Woo also wants to try out styles of debating, some of which may go against established norms. According to Woo, the most successful Lincoln-Douglas debaters in the region tend to be tall males with a very specific type of presentation style. “I want to try doing things that feel more authentic to myself,” she said, adding that she hopes it will encourage her teammates to try new things as well.
But some things Woo plans to keep doing the same. With every tournament, she writes down all the people who helped her along the way as part of her reflections. This includes everyone who offered support, feedback and words of encouragement. It also includes her opponents, Woo said, noting that they helped her become a better debater.
“Whenever you win, you should never take full credit for it because fundamentally, it’s not you. It’s the people around you, it’s your environment and that’s what made you a good debater,” she said.