In debate, there are no timeouts. Just speeches measured to the second, evidence that is scrutinized line by line and arguments that can collapse or succeed in a matter of one or two sentences. For members of the Kansas State Debate Team, that pressure isn’t intimidating; it’s the entire point of what they do.
For Cody Spurlock, sophomore in communications, this pressure has been a pivotal part of his life for the last seven years.
“I’ve been doing debate since I was a freshman in high school,” Spurlock said. “It’s shaped how I express myself. I’m a better arguer, but also probably a better person as well.”
Spurlock describes debate as a game that trains critical thinking, a skill he believes is growing increasingly rare.
“Debate has been integral to the development of my academics and to my ability to analyze things, to critically evaluate them,” Spurlock said. “In a world where not a lot of people critically think, I think it’s a very important and useful skill.”
Despite doing debate for the past seven years, Spurlock’s first round of collegiate debate was a wake-up call to the level of competition he would be facing over the next four years.
“The debate we do in college is much faster,” Spurlock said. “We’re talking like 350 words per minute. So my ‘welcome to debate’ moment was someone just dumping probably 30 different arguments on me in six minutes. We did not win, but I got a lot better after that.”
But the moment he realized that K-State debate was where he belonged was during the CEDA National Tournament, during a round against well-known K-State foes, the University of Kansas.
“Kansas has a long history of debate,” Spurlock said. “KU, as much as I love to hate them, has probably the best debate team in the country, historically. They have multiple NDT [National Debate Tournament] wins, multiple first-round bids.
“There was a moment during our cross examination portion where I kind of just realized ‘They’re not much better,’” Spurlock said. “We ended up winning that round, and it kind of hammered in that it doesn’t matter where you start, it matters where you end up.”
Kyle Draeger, sophomore in political science and philosophy, is Spurlock’s debate partner. His road to K-State debate differs heavily from his partner’s. Draeger started his college debate career on the JV side of the divisions before eventually shifting over into open debate, the largest category of collegiate debate.
Draeger joined debate during his junior year of high school, but before that, he said he felt unfocused.
“I just didn’t have a lot going on generally,” Draeger said. “I was averaging probably 14 hours a day on Apex Legends. I always felt a little bad that I didn’t have anything going on or have any goals that I was working towards. Debate gave me that.”
Draeger’s first debate team meeting was where he realized that he belonged in K-State Debate.
“Debate has its own language,” he said. “Talking within that, with everybody, I just got really comfortable really fast. It felt like I had known these people for months. I got really excited to work with them for the rest of my college career and to work with all of them.”
K-State Debate’s team culture is one that is a bit tricky to describe.
“I’m balancing between either whimsical or chaotic,” Spurlock said. “We’re an interesting squad … We do things that are a bit unconventional at times and kind of carve our own path, against the grain instead of with it.”
That whimsical chaos transfers directly into the team’s debate technique, allowing the team to diversify itself from other teams.
“I would say we’re one of the more unique squads in the country,” Spurlock said. “We have a lot of different kinds of debaters, some debaters go more on the critical literature side, and some focus on your very typical policy aff [affirmative]. We’re a critique-heavy team when we’re negative. There’s been a long, long tradition that the ‘K’ in K-State stands for critique. It’s an argument that we run a ton.”
For Draeger, the culture looks a bit different.
“It’s centered around a very high level of competitive drive,” Draeger said. “But it’s somewhat contrasted by a really fun energy … We’re very focused on what we enjoy and how we get entertainment and pedagogical value out of debate, but at the same time, we all really want to win and do well. We want to always enjoy it and get value out of it. I think that creates a very thriving community facet to the team.”
However, the debate team is made up of more than just Spurlock and Draeger. In total, K-State Debate has six different partnerships, three of which most recently competed at the District Qualifiers held by Southern Nazarene University in Bethany, Oklahoma.
Each school is given two slots for a bid to NDT — K-State had three.
“On a win percentage level, my team was ranked third,” Spurlock said about his and Draeger’s partnership. “We were not set to qualify. At almost every other tournament, there’s no competition with your team. You’re not allowed to debate them in a round.”
The District Qualifiers, however, are different from most other tournaments.
“At this tournament, there’s a level of competition, which is kind of unfortunate because it makes debate tournaments a little bit more stressful,” Spurlock said. “But even though we were the lowest-ranked team on the squad, we had a good enough tournament and we ended up grabbing our bid to nationals.”
While both the partnerships of Spurlock and Draeger and Dan Robertson and Taryn Day have secured their spots at the NDT, the entirety of the squad is turning its attention to the upcoming competition on March 26 in Houston, Texas.
Despite being less than a week out from their last tournament, all the focus is on nationals.
“It requires a lot of work from here,” Spurlock said. “It’s just gonna be doing everything we can to maximize how well we do at these bigger tournaments. It’s going to be a long road; we’re still decompressing from districts, but it’s [NDT] less than a month away now. We’re going to hit the ground running and focus on what’s next.”
