After a fall semester of heated debates centered on the theme of climate change, the Rutgers University-Newark Debate Team, housed at Rutgers School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA), has outdone its stellar performance last season with a record peak in the midseason rankings.
Currently, the Cross Examination Debate Association has ranked the team as 11th in the nation.
The National Debate Tournament places the team even higher, with a ranking of ninth in the nation, and fifth in the nation for the varsity team.
Rankings are determined after an evaluation of the collective successes of the debate pairings on the team, and the debate program overall.
Three individual teams ranked within the top 100 debate partnerships nationally:
- Nicole Nave (SPAA '19) and Devane Murphy (SPAA '19) are currently ranked eighth
- Hannah Stafford (School of Social Work '17) and Luis Carrera (SPAA '19) are currently ranked 34th
- Chaz Wyche (Newark College of Arts and Sciences '19) and Andreas Monclut (SPAA '20) are ranked 62nd
During the season, the debate duo of Wyche and Moncult won Monmouth University’s Jersey Shore Invitational Tournament in November 2016.
The debate team found continued success at the esteemed Franklin R. Shirley Tournament at Wake Forest University, with all three nationally ranked teams achieving winning records of five or more wins out of eight debates. In addition, Nave and Murphy advanced to the semifinals of the Shirley Tournament, beating the third nationally ranked team from the University of California, Berkeley, and finishing with a controversial 2-1 loss to Harvard’s top ranked team in the nation. Nave and Murphy’s efforts earned them eighth and ninth place, respectively, out of the tournament’s 236 competitors.
Stafford finished the season with top speaker awards at the Weber State Round Robin (Weber State University) and the West Point Debate Tournament (United States Military Academy). For receiving the top speaker award at West Point, Stafford received the Brigadier General Daniel J. Kaufman Traveling Plaque Award.
“This is the best the team has done collectively and individually in the rankings at the end of the first half of the season,” said Chris Kozak, debate team director. “This puts us in a strong position to do even better in the rankings at the end of the 2016-17 season than we did in the 2015-16 season.”
The second half of the debate season will resume in spring 2017 with a tournament at the University of Southern California on January 3.
Photo: Nora Luongo
