While most members of Lynbrook Robotics have been busily working on the current Breakaway game since January, several members have also attended and succeeded at a few major tournaments in Speech and Debate.
This past weekend, February 6th and 7th, several Lynbrook Robotics team members competed in one of the largest high school speech and debate tournaments in the nation. The Stanford Invitational brought together over 1,500 students from all over the country. Vice President Chinmay Jaju took 1st place in Expository speech, beating out nearly 60 other competitors. Chinmay has always done well in this event, placing highly in other competitions, but he finally broke through this weekend after giving sensational speeches about Villains, appropriately mixing excellent presentation skills, astounding visual aids, and beautiful rhetoric.
In Parliamentary debate, modeled after the British Parliamentary system, two LRT members advanced into elimination rounds. This was the largest division of Parliamentary Debate ever in a high school tournament, with over 110 teams entered into the pool. This meant that teams needed to achieve a record of 4-2 or better with a great quality of consisting speaking ability. Parliamentary Debate is unique among debate events because teams only get the topics 20 minutes before the debate begins, and competitors must be well versed in current global affairs. Webmaster Karthik Viswanathan and his partner, Ruicong Yan, advanced to elimination rounds placing in the top 32. Veteran member Aditya Majumdar, and his partner, Indranil Bora, also advanced to double octafinals (top 32 teams) after having been the 9th seed and advancing to late elimination rounds in 2009 as well. These two teams were among 6 Lynbrook teams to advance out of preliminary rounds, setting a tournament record.
Three weeks ago, a few of these members also attend the James Logan Invitational in Union City. This tournament drew over 1000 competitors as well, with competitors flying in from 7 states, and with over 100 entries in each event. In Parliamentary Debate, rookie member Elliot Young advanced to Double Octafinals with his partner, Anjana Rao. This is an excellent achievement as it was Elliot’s first varsity tournament of this size! Aditya Majumdar narrowly missed advancing in Parliamentary Debate by just one rank. He did advance to Quarterfinals in Impromptu Speaking, and won 9th place in National Extemporaneous speaking; both of these events involve severely limited preparation time and necessitate quick thinking.
Please congratulate these students for their successes while handling both programs concurrently!
- Aditya
