Last weekend, students on the Mira Loma Speech and Debate team made league history.
From Saturday the 23rd through Sunday the 24th, Mira Loma’s Speech and Debate team competed in the National Catholic Forensics League (NCFL) Qualifier, one of two national tournaments the team attends every year. Those doing speech sent in pre-recorded Youtube videos for their respective events, and those doing limited prep speech or debate events debated live via zoom and Classrooms.cloud. There were a wide variety of competition events. Speech events at the tournament included Declamation, Duo Interpretation, Dramatic Interpretation, Extemporaneous, Impromptu, Oral Interpretation, and Original Oratory. Debate events included Congress, Varsity Lincoln Douglas, and Varsity Public Forum.
However, perhaps the most notable accomplishment of the competition was that of the Mira Loma Public Forum (PF) team. The PF team has been active since the very beginning of the school year, and a couple of dedicated upperclassmen even hosted summer camps and a tournament over the summer. PF members have been showing significant growth and potential throughout the season.
At the tournament, after debating a total of four preliminary rounds, the results for the advancing quarterfinalists were posted. All eight advancing teams were from Mira Loma. Additionally, the top four speaker awards in PF went to Mira Loma students. They had completely dominated the competition. This is something unprecedented in the history of speech and debate in the Sacramento area. Holden Carillo ‘22, who qualified for nationals and was the top speaker at the tournament says, “We’ve been working hard on this topic for the past month, and it was an amazing feeling to find out that not just I qualified, but also the entire top 8 was from our school. It definitely felt like all our work paid off on that day.”
Because all eight teams advancing were Mira Loma teams, the two captains, Hemang Dhaulakhandi ’21 and Alex Shan ’21 were left with the tough decision of selecting four teams to advance to the national competition. Shan recalls, “When finding out that all top 8 teams were Mira Loma, I felt quite proud of the PF team for making such quick improvements in a short period of time. Unfortunately, choosing the top four between so many deserving debaters was a heartbreak, but I think we chose the best candidates to represent ML at Nationals.”
To put this into perspective, even if all four of the chosen teams were to hypothetically choose not to attend nationals, all national spots from the Sacramento area would still go to Mira Loma.
In addition to the PF team, two ML students qualified for nationals with speech, and two others qualified in Congress.
The following are the results from the tournament:
Public Forum Debate National Qualifiers:
Neha Suri & Khadijah Atthar
Holden Carrillo & Luke Jones
Surya Srikumar & Raghava Kodavatikanti
Kanishk Vankayala & Evan Yuan
Public Forum Debate Quarterfinalists:
Joyce Ro & Tanuj Jujaray
Kushal Chebiyam & Srivishal Sudharsan
Aditya Anantaraman & Showmen Talukder
Reva Sharma & Pranavi Khanna
Public Forum Debate Speaker Awards:
1st – Holden Carrillo
2nd – Pranavi Khanna
3rd – Luke Jones
4th – Reva Sharma
Congressional Debate Qualifiers:
Chinyce Cole-Henry
Tanya Richards
Declamation Speech Qualifier:
Raghava Kodavatikanti
Oral Interpretation Qualifier:
Janelle Choi
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