April 24, 2003

Debate team earns back-to-back national championships

By Wendy Leopold

Just as the Syracuse Orangemen clinched the NCAA basketball championship against the Kansas Jayhawks, the Northwestern Debate Team soared to victory over long-time rival Dartmouth College in the 57th Annual National Debate Tournament (NDT) in Atlanta.

The Wildcats were awarded the championship in a unanimous decision by a panel of five debate coach judges from across the country. The win represents a back-to-back national debate championship for Northwestern (which won last year’s NDT title) and the Wildcats’ sixth title in the last 10 years.

The NDT has boasted back-to-back winners only five times in its 57-year history. Four of those five back-to-backs were won by the Wildcats; three of them were won under Northwestern Coach Scott Deatherage. The “winningest” team in NDT history, the Wildcats have earned the NDT championship a total of 12 times. Dartmouth and Harvard are tied for the NDT second place with six titles each.

“We’re ecstatic,” said Deatherage, who has coached the Wildcats for 17 years. The Wildcats came into the tournament as the top-seeded team in what Deatherage called a highly competitive season. “Far more often than not, the top seeded team loses the tournament,” he noted.

But the pressure on the part of their competitors to beat the top-seeded team failed to deter senior Geoff Garen (from Minneapolis) or sophomore Tristan Morales (from San Antonio). The two won the NDT on Emory University’s campus debating the merits of a proposal to have the United States ratify international laws prohibiting the death penalty.

Undergraduates Garen and Morales also were awarded the NDT’s Rex M. Copeland Memorial Award, presented each year to the first seed team at the onset of the 13-round tournament. The team is only the fifth to win both the Copeland Award and tournament competition in the same season.

A total of 80 teams from universities and colleges across the country compete for the NDT championship. The elimination process of the teams is very similar to the process of eliminating basketball teams in the NCAA.

Asked if the Northwestern debate team next year will be the first team ever to win an NDT “three-peat,” Coach Deatherage responded cautiously. “We’ll see,” he said.