I remember...some of it

Ah, history.

This weekend the Panivore managed to tied the Sailor record for TOC bids in one year, which is seven. After a while the number of bids doesn’t really matter anymore. I mean, once you’re fully qualified, it’s nothing more than statistics. Which means, of course, that O’C’s ears immediately perked up. Statistics? Debate history? Awards? He thought he might have to go diving into the bilge water of Sailor legend to find out who exactly did what, but at least in what I guess we can safely refer to as the Menick Years, I know perfectly well. I haven’t forgotten all that much. Yet.

The daughter managed to scrape together five bids in her day in her senior year. Considering that she didn’t even go to the TOC, this was mostly of parenthetical interest at the time. That was the year the local state tournament was held the same weekend, and all her friends were going to be at that one, and she didn’t give the proverbial hoot about TOC by comparison. This was Kate through and through. Noah G managed to get seven bids as a senior, thus setting the modern team record. He started going to TOC as, if I remember correctly, a sophomore. I started going with him after a while, and there was a period there when Hen Hud had TOC types hanging from the rafters. We were lousy with bids, to put it mildly. We attracted them like fleas to a mutt. (Not that the Sailors were mutts, of course: the VCA knows well my inability to scrape together the two halves of a metaphor.) We just happened to have some good debaters, which I attribute to the water from the local nuclear power plant. If you had uranium enriching your daily bread, you’d get more bids too.

I have always believed that there is a combination of ingredients to $ircuit success, the first of which is the debater. You can’t make a silk purse, etc. Some people are just naturals at this business. It is possible for coaches to stymie that inherent ability, but if you don’t get in the way too much, it will blossom. Then, of course, there are coaches who obviously have ability that combines well with a source of good debaters. You couldn’t put, say, Bietz into the La Jolla Institute for the Criminally Insane and Sort of Dull Adolescent and expect his team to take home a national championship or two, but his record with solid raw material demonstrates that he must be doing something right again and again. In other words, bad coaching can inhibit good debaters and good coaching can develop better debaters. Neutral coaching—my specialty—at least won’t hurt them, but then again, my goal is to start them down the track. Where they go after that is up to them.

It all boils down to what you want to get out of the activity. I consider the competitive part of it important, but not at all as important as everything else. There’s all the learning that goes into understanding the topics, there’s all the maturity required to show up and get things done correctly and in a timely manner, there’s the opening up to new people and new ideas. Competition enables this stuff, which is why the competition is important. That this stuff enables the competition is beside the point, and isn’t at all why most coaches bother. Winning is great, but you can lose a lot of rounds and still get all the benefits of debate. Sure, some of us will remember who won what when, but most of us will remember more the students who grew and learned as a result of being team members; when you get together five years later, you probably won’t talk about that spike the aff ran in the third round. The trophies will be dusty in the basement (or the lack of trophies long forgotten). What will matter is having gone through the experiences. Debaters will be better for it than if they hadn’t gone through them. And they will know that, and remember those times fondly.