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![“When I came into high school, I was ready to be a follower. But DECA was a game changer for me. It helped me overcome my fear of public speaking, and it's played such a major role in who I've become today. To be able to successfully lead a chapter of 150 students, an officer team and be one of the upperclassmen I once really admired is something I'm [really] proud of,” Anvitha Tummala ('21) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-25-at-9.50.05-AM-900x594.png)
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![“[Volleyball has] taught me how to fall correctly, and another thing it taught is that you don’t have to be the best at something to be good at it. If you just hit the ball in a smart way, then it still scores points and you’re good at it. You could be a background player and still make a much bigger impact on the team than you would think,” Anya Gert (’20) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AnnaGert_JinTuan_HoHPhotoEdited-600x900.jpeg)
![“I'm not nearly there yet, but [my confidence has] definitely been getting better since I was pretty shy and timid coming into Harker my freshman year. I know that there's a lot of people that are really confident in what they do, and I really admire them. Everyone's so driven and that has really pushed me to kind of try to find my own place in high school and be more confident,” Alyssa Huang (’20) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AlyssaHuang_EmilyChen_HoHPhoto-900x749.jpeg)
Upper school speech and debate team competes at the Jon Schamber Invitational in Stockton
Courtesy of Andrew Tierno
Junior Andrew Tierno poses with his trophy from the tournament. The tournament took place last weekend.
November 6, 2015
The upper school speech and debate team traveled to Stockton last weekend to compete at the Jon Schamber Invitational, a speech and debate tournament.
The tournament, hosted annually by the University of the Pacific, invited high school speakers and debaters from the Bay Area to compete in multiple categories. The Jon Schamber Invitational offered ten speech events and parliamentary, Lincoln-Douglas, policy and public forum debate.
Juniors Andrew Tierno, Sana Aladin, Divya Rajasekharan, Rishi Maheshwari, Jay Paranjpe and Nikhil Manglik as well as sophomores Jimmy Lin, Kevin Xu, Justin Xie, Derek Kuo, Emily Chen, Karena Kong and Shikhar Solanki all competed at the tournament.
Andrew competed in Dramatic Interpretation, a speech event in which students present an excerpt from a published, non-comedic work while adopting the roles of the characters in the story and presenting each with a different voice and posture. He advanced to the final round and placed first out of 23 participants, performing an excerpt from Andrew Foster’s short story “A New Kind of Gravity.”
“I wasn’t even sure I was going to get to the qualifiers; I felt that there was more work that could have been done,” Andrew said. “It came as a really big surprise, I guess.”
Speech coach Greg Achten, who worked with Andrew on character development and helped him find distinct ways to portray each of the different characters in his piece, shared his thoughts on the tournament.
“I thought all of our students did really well; Andrew worked very hard, so it was great to see that hard work pay off in his first tournament of the year,” Achten said. “Divya and Sana missed making it into finals by one spot. They had a very good first tournament.”
Achten and public forum coach Sandy Berkowitz helped the students prepare by listening to speeches and developing strong arguments to present at the tournament. The Jon Schamber Invitational was also one of the last tournaments in which public forum debaters addressed the September and October topic; as public forum debate topics change every month, competitors will debate the topic Resolved: In response to the current crisis, a government should prioritize the humanitarian needs of refugees over its national interests in November.
“We’ll always prepare more,” Berkowitz said. “We have a new topic this month, and so that is something that we are working on- and we have some new teams that are going out, so we have some of the same teams that are going out on the new topic, and we have more new teams that didn’t debate on the September and October topic that are going out in November.”
Public forum team Emily and Karena finished their run at the tournament with an overall record of two wins and three losses. Emily was also the fifteenth speaker overall out of all of the debaters who participated in public forum.
“My partner and I did well in terms of presentation, and we are satisfied with our standing at the tournament,” Emily said. “I think that this tournament taught us a lot about what we need to do in preparation for future competitions, and it was overall a beneficial experience.”
Public forum team Jimmy Lin and Kevin Xu and the team of Justin Xie and Derek Kuo finished their runs at the tournament with overall records of three wins and two losses, but they did not have enough speaker points to advance to the octafinal round.
“I felt that we were very close to advancing, which in my mind is a sign that we definitely have the capability to improve,” Jimmy said. “At the same time, I think it also points out an area for us to focus improvement, which would be our speaking skills and our ability to clearly convey our ideas to the judges.”
Nikhil, who competed in public forum with his partner Shikhar, shared his thoughts on his process for preparing for the tournament. Previously a policy debater, the Jon Schamber Invitational was one of his first tournaments as a public forum competitor.
“We definitely could have prepared more,” Nikhil said. “We prepared our own case very well and we prepared the defenses for our case very well- what happened is that we were deficient in when they brought up their points, we did not have adequate answers sometimes, so we had to fall back on some weaker analysis.”
The speech and debate team traveled to the Apple Valley MinneApple Debate, hosted by Apple Valley High School in Minnesota, on Nov. 5.
