On a cloudy Saturday evening in the Marriott Westchase Hotel in Houston, two teams share the stage in a decorated ballroom anxiously awaiting results. 

The tension builds in the atmosphere as they wait for a judge to share the final decision and the debaters try to reassure one another of their hard work up until this point.

Then, the room falls silent. The competitors collectively inhale as the judge announces “Second place goes Hockaday!” The moment of silence is overtaken by an uproar of cheers and applause as smiles spread across faces and tears of joy well up in debaters eyes. This was the indication that the Coppell Black team had risen to the top, taking first in the World Schools state debate competition.

On March 9-12, the Coppell Black team (senior Umang Vinayaka, senior Sahith Mocharla, junior Anushree De, senior Shrayes Gunna and senior Suchit Ineni) competed in Houston in the Texas Forensics Association (TFA) state competition. The team advanced through 11 rounds to emerge victorious in finals with its first place win.

World Schools is a slightly less rigid event in debate allowing teams and works with impromptu topics as well as using a more conversational style.

“World schools debate has a lot more intuitive arguments,” said De, team captain. “In a lot of other forms of debate it’s much more technical and you’re given an argument with jargon that feels very inaccessible. World Schools is different in that the way I’m conversing right now is how I would talk in a round.”

In order to advance to the state competition teams must score ten points over the course of their tournaments. Coppell began preparing for this and scored those points early on in the season.

“We spent the first couple of months [October through December] trying to get the 10 points we needed to go to state,” De said. “After that it was like a huge burden lifted off our shoulders especially for the seniors. Once we got those 10 points it gave them a little more relief so that they could focus on other things.”

The preparation for state was somewhat arduous involving many practices and drills as well extra work put in by the individual debaters. The turnaround was quick following their return from the Berkeley tournament.

“When we came back from Berkeley we had to take a complete 180,” Gunna said. “We had to create our motions and everything in far less time than other people because the motions came out in early February. It was challenging but I wouldn’t change anything about it, it really helped me adapt to a whole new world and delve deep into wells of knowledge that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

The team kept motivation up throughout the rounds through sharing a special gesture.

“We started fist bumping after every round,” Mocharla said. “High fives just felt awkward and it developed into a sort of tradition. I think it just became a really neat way of saying, ‘we got you, good job’ or ‘you’ll get ‘em next time’ but for this tournament I started saying ‘no regrets’ because that’s what it meant. We had put in our all for this tournament and what was going to happen was going to happen, we were going to control what we could and make sure that when we left we had put in our all and when most of us graduate that we could say we did everything we could.”

The biggest moment of the trip was the award ceremony. With the delegates making it to the final round, they were eagerly awaiting the results.

“It was so nice,” De said. “There were only three judges [as opposed to the five that were supposed to be there] so that made the stakes even higher. We were on the stage and we were a little scared but we knew we had worked hard.”

The team was beyond elated when the places were announced.

“We all kind of did something different,” Mocharla said. “Shrayes was at the end of the line and he gave everyone a hug and I think Anu started crying a little bit. Umang and Suchit looked at each other shocked and I was also a little shocked but I just gave my teammate a hug and that was it.”

The triumphs didn’t end there. CHS senior Keerthi Chalamalasetty received the Golden Gavel (perfect speaker) Award. This award is given to the top speaker at the meet which is determined by making perfect points in the preliminary rounds and being ranked first out of 110 people.

“Receiving the golden gavel means a lot to me,” Chalamalasetty said. “Receiving it is really important to me and just exemplifies all the hard work that I have put in over the past four years. It just shows me that if I can work hard anything is possible and I just have to keep going.”

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