Wednesday, February 24, 2010
When Dylan Quigley was a freshman in high school, he joined the debate team to prepare for a career in politics. His career choice has since changed, but Quigley is still debating.
Patrick Kennedy, a sophomore from Leawood, Dylan Quigley, a senior from Wichita, and Chris Stone, a senior from Derby, are members of the 2010 Jayhawks debate team. The KU debaters qualified for the national debate tournament, which will be held on March 19-22 in California.
“I loved the intellectual combat aspect of it,” Quigley, a senior from Wichita, said. “It’s one of the more exciting things you can do as a nerd, and it’s a whole lot of fun.”
Quigley will participate in the ultimate intellectual battle at the National Debate Tournament March 19-22. Chris Stone, a senior from Derby, Patrick Kennedy, a junior from Leawood, and Sean Kennedy, a senior from Leawood, also qualified for the tournament, which will be held at the University of California-Berkeley.
Kansas has competed in the tournament 43 straight times, reaching the final four 14 times and winning five championships. Kansas debaters Brett Bricker and Nate Johnson won the tournament last year.
To prepare for the debating season, debaters spend up to 40 hours per week researching and practicing a topic, coach Scott Harris said. Nine assistant coaches, who are full-time graduate students in communications, help the team research.
“The common estimate is that the amount of work a debater does in the year is equivalent to the amount of work a master’s student will do on their thesis,” Stone, who will be making his fourth appearance at the tournament, said.
Patrick Kennedy tries to plan all of his classes on Tuesday and Thursday to make time for tournaments, but still has trouble balancing schoolwork during the debate season.
“When we go to tournaments it’s really bad because it’s like four days long, not including travel,” Patrick Kennedy said.
The time commitment makes it difficult to form lasting friendships with people outside of debate, Quigley said. But it also opens up new friendship possibilities.
“I have friends from every state, and I see them a couple times a month in a different hotel, a different school, or a different city around the nation,” Quigley said.
Involvement in debate takes its toll on the typical college experience, but Quigley said he didn’t regret missing out on a crazy spring break in Cancún or Florida to prepare for competitions.
“I made the decision when I got here at some point that this is what I wanted, and this is something I wanted to be good at,” Quigley said.
Harris said that debaters needed this sort of passion because they didn’t receive much in financial gain or public praise.
“Debate is something where we don’t have massive crowds greet us when we come back,” Harris said.
Kansas debate isn’t about money or glory for Quigley. He said debating was special to him because of the team’s history at Kansas, something he realized while attending an alumni reunion.
“I walked into our squad room where we have banners for all our final fours and championships that KU has gotten, and to be part of that and maybe hang my own banner is something pretty significant,” Quigley said.
— Edited by Sarah Bluvas
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