Junior Hannah Piros and senior Hayley Tice went to a state tournament for debate and broke octofinals with their piece on Education Reform. Unlike a regular tournament, this state tournament was more challenging.

“It’s a bigger deal,” Tice said. “We have people who think they’re the best in the state. At regular tournaments, you can have people that just show up, but at state, everyone has to qualify to be there. It’s the best of the best people.” 

At the beginning of the year, Debate teams are given a controversial topic to either agree or disagree with. This year’s topic was about education reform.

‘“It was about education,” Piros said. “So what Hayley and I decided to debate about was taking a stance about sexism. Not only in debate, but also in an educational space which wasn’t well received by a lot of people. [But] When it was well received, it had very positive feedback which was reassuring to us and we were happy to get that message out there.”

Both Tice and Piros said they were very excited to have gotten as far as they did, feeling like their strenuous efforts finally paid off.

“It’s a lot of research, we come in and do practice rounds, we’re constantly [here] after school,” Tice said. “It’s a ridiculous amount of time. Per week for state, [it’s] about ten hours, and that’s not including class time.”

They broke to octofinals, which means that they made it through several rounds of the tournament and beat many competitors.

At the end of the day, Piros said the girls were just happy to have gotten their message out there.

“State, for us, was a validation of the fact that we were making a change within the debate community,” Piros said. “We were just happy to have made an impact.”