In a small classroom, four students sit across from one another in teams of two. After a moment, the first student steps up to the podium and takes a deep breath. At the start of his timer, he begins speaking. At a dizzying pace, he defends a resolution, reading pages upon pages of evidence, analysis, and statistics in a passionate tone.
His speech is oriented around the topic of intellectual property rights and, more specifically, trademarks. The speaker argues that strengthening intellectual property rights by expanding the scope of what can be trademarked is beneficial since trademarks provide legitimacy to brands and the legal protection of products, which leads to an increase in profits when attained.
For eight minutes, he zooms through his speech as the opposing team of two scribble down his statements, draft refutations, and search for literature to negate his argument. After his speech, they spend three minutes taking turns questioning him about his argument in an attempt to find its flaws and reveal its shortcomings. In the next 90 minutes, this cycle will continue; these teams will alternate speaking in increments of five or eight minutes, interrupted by three-minute periods of cross-examination and increments of limited preparation time.
This is a Policy Debate round, an opportunity introduced this year for members of the Poly Prep debate team.
According to Poly’s Director of Forensics and Debate Eddie Fitzgerald, “Debate at Poly has gone through several different iterations of their program…but the current iteration of this program began again in 2011.” Since then, the team has reinvented itself in several different ways. Despite offering multiple debate events in the early 2010s, Poly had discontinued all but two of them by 2022. Now, the team plans to make another programmatic shift to develop their new offering: Policy Debate.
While this change has accompanied both struggles and accomplishments, it’s allowed Poly’s debate team to continue their legacy of success while also ensuring that students have opportunities to both academically enrich themselves and enjoy themselves while doing so.
The Dawn of Debate – 1875-2010
The Poly Prep debate team, founded under the name of The Debating Society, has a rich history. According to the Fall 2013 edition of The Blue & The Gray, the team began in 1875 and was officially recognized as a school activity in 1894. In 1901, the team, now referred to as The Poly Prep Literary and Debating Society, was recognized by the Polyglot as “the oldest school organization.”
In its earliest days, Poly’s debate team offered two debate events: Mock Congress and Parliamentary Law. While Parliamentary Debates take different forms, they’re generally based on the British Parliamentary system and have two teams of two either affirm or negate a resolution introduced twenty minutes prior to the round.
By 1916, the Polyglot shared that “debate was gradually becoming an important feature of Poly life,” as Poly Prep’s debate team established itself as a successful program, winning several tournaments and introducing Public Speaking and other speech events in 1937.
The team continued to excel in Mock Congress and Parliamentary Law until English Teacher, Associate Director of College Counseling, and Debate Coach Jackie Kornblum decided to discontinue these events in favor of the Lincoln Douglass debate, or LD. Distinct from other forms, LD is a unique event due to its one-on-one debating style and focus on morality. While The Blue & The Gray suggests that this shift happened in 1999, several Polygon articles indicate that it happened as early as 1997.
Although the debate team saw incredible success in LD, Elijah Sivin, director of service learning and history faculty, shared that the program was shut down around 2007 with Kournblum’s departure. Sivin, one of Poly’s Lincoln Douglas judges in the ’90s, stated in
an email that “Because the program basically revolved around [Kornblum], when she left Poly for Dalton, there wasn’t anyone ready to take her place as head coach.”
And so, Poly’s debate team came to an abrupt end, not being revived until years later.
New Beginnings – 2009-2013
While the team wasn’t completely re-established until 2011, it began to gain traction around 2009. According to The Blue & The Gray, a teacher restarted the team as an elective
course, offering LD to those interested. However, it wasn’t until an alum’s donation that the team really began to blossom.
“A few years before I came on, there was an anonymous donor who wanted Poly to create a debate program,” said David Baloche, the 2013-2016 director of speech and debate. “So they gave a lot of money to the school for the specific purpose of creating a debate program, [and] they did.”
This donation not only saw Poly’s team be re-established, but also caused it to become larger and more rigorous than before. According to The Blue & The Gray, in 2012, this donation enabled Debate Coach Brent Adams to introduce Public Forum, or PF, which is a partnered debate event oriented around current events.
With the traction that both this funding and the new event offered, the program thrived. In 2013 alone, Poly’s debate team won 110 awards, including the Metro-Hud-
son League award of “Debate Program of The Year.”
Full Steam Ahead – 2013-2016
As the program began to develop, it offered more events. While Baloche shared in an email that “technically, I offered all events,” he “only had [the] capacity and resources to support students in certain events,” which were those with the most student and community engagement. From 2013-2016, these were PF, LD, and Congressional Debate, which is a variation of Mock Congress.
However, Baloche added that while there were around 18 Public Forum debaters, there were only two Congressional debaters. According to Jonah Sah ’22, a Poly Public Forum debater from 2015-2022 and team captain in 2022, there was one LD debater.
As a result of the small number of Congressional and LD debaters, Baloche claimed that they “[debated] without much support” but “understood that and worked hard to compete anyway.”
As for Poly’s competitors, Baloche shared that they were often from other New York private schools but changed frequently depending on the circuit Poly was competing in.
“It’s like one of those…Russian [nesting] dolls,” said Baloche when describing the teams Poly would compete against. “There’s the national level, which is the top shell, and then when you remove that, you have the state level. And then when you remove [that], you have [the] New
York City metropolitan area,” and then the Brooklyn area.
In an email, he shared that Poly participated in six total local and national debate leagues,
all of which the team still competes in today.
“Poly is incredibly lucky,” said Sah when reflecting on his experience with the team. “There are maybe five schools that send as many debaters to as many tournaments on the national circuit as we do.”
Constant Success – 2016-2022
While Baloche left Poly in 2016, the team continued to thrive. According to a 2016 Polygon article, the Public Forum team of Eitan Ezera ‘16 and Harrison Hurt ‘16 not only won the National Catholic Forensic League but were also ranked as one of the top ten teams in the country.
According to Sah, another constant on the team was the community. “What kept me in debate for so long was that it was a lot of the same people,” he said. “There was always this very friendly culture.”
Nonetheless, there were slight shifts that accompanied the change in leadership. As Baloche departed, Sah shared that “there [were] several different coaches that we cycled through,
[and] they all definitely had different [coaching] styles.”
Over text, he clarified that “the team felt like it went from emphasizing technical debate to more of a focus on lay debate,” a style where debaters attempt to appeal to the average person and their ethos rather than delving into the specifics of a round. However, Sah acknowledged that this “could [have] just be[een] my own process as I got older and had more experience.”
Regardless, he considers these changes as “superficial,” for the debate community, and the benefits of debating itself remained.
“[Being on the debate team] made me much more aware of the world around me,” said Sah. “It pushed me to do a lot of activism and try to take an active role in how the world works.”
A Complete Reinvention – 2022-Now
In 2022, Poly’s Congressional Debate program was discontinued by Caitlin Bliss, who was both the assistant director of the speech program and running Congressional Debate at the time.
“[Coaching Congress] was a high burden, especially….with the growth that we’ve had in speech over the past years,” explained Fitzgerald, who oversaw Bliss’s decision as the director of speech and debate. “It was too much for one person to be able to handle both of those kinds of programs.”
However, while Congress remains discontinued, Bliss shared that she “would bring it back if there were more than five people interested in creating a Congress team. The problem is, the evidence burden for Congress is a lot, and if it’s one or two students, it’s just too much.”
In addition to the discontinuation of Congress, Poly has recently made the decision to discontinue LD next year. This, according to Fitzgerald, coincides with “the emergence [of], and increased resources being diverted towards, our Policy Debate program.”
While Fitzgerald shared that “we really like the possibility of having Lincoln Douglas as an offering” due to the critical arguments about race and identity that can be made, “all of the benefits that we can get from that can also be met in the Policy Debate program.” As a result, the one-on-one event will be phased out when its sole member, Rani Green ’25, leaves for college next year.
Moreover, while all new novice debaters will be coached in Policy Debate, the Public Forum team will continue to compete. Sohail Jouya, the assistant director of debate, shared that the purpose of this was to allow “folks who have established those foundational skills in [Public Forum] to stay in Public Forum.”
However, Jouya also shared that “Policy Debate is easily the most academically rigorous activity available to all young people. Doing only Public Forum debates, I think, was very limiting for students. The resurgence and revival of the program was limited to Public Forum Debate mostly because it was considered to be easier, and it would be easier to recruit students.”
Ava Barbiere ’26, who co-captains Poly’s debate team alongside her brother, corroborates this. Despite spending several years in PF, Barbiere shared that she was motivated to switch to Policy due to PF being “generally very laid back when it comes to how people debate.” This, she said, often allowed for poor judging and frivolous arguments.
According to Ava Barbiere, many judges were the parents of debaters who were uneducated on the topic of discussion. While this allowed for debaters to gain communicative and adaptive skills which she shared are “helpful for almost any [job] we would want to go into later in life,” it often detracted from the academic outcomes of rounds.
“In Public Forum, we would be evaluated on a bunch of other things, and there’d be a bunch of biases that parents would have that would just moot the educational value,” said Eric Barbiere ’26.
However, “Policy more or less eliminates that,” said Ava Barberie. “Judging is [from] people [who] actually care. People pay attention. People give you an actual reason for why you win or lose a round. There’s more of an academic discussion happening.”
And in Policy, Poly’s debate team has been thriving. At their first Policy tournament in November at the University of Michigan, they won first place. At a recent competition at Mamaroneck High School in December, one of Poly’s teams were semifinalists.
“The switch to policy [was] supported by the greatest coaching staff in the Northeast and one of the best ones in the country,” said Eric Barbiere. He shared that there was “no doubt” they had been with him every step of the way.
