The SIU Debate Dawgs’ Successes:
2007 - 2008
The team of Kyle Dennis and Kevin Calderwood are the 2008 National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence champions. The defeated competition from all over the nation including Washburn, Western Kentucky, Berkeley, Texas Tech, and UCLA. There Calderwood won the 4 th best speaker award and Dennis was 11 th . They also won the Point Loma Round Robin and open tournament, and the second half of the Long Beach Swing. They also reached the final round of the Webster tournament and Claremont. They reached semi-finals of The first half of the Long Beach Swing and both sides of the Mile-High swing. What an incredible season.
The team of Katie Thomas and Adam Testerman finished in 9 th place at the NPTE. They reached semi finals at the Webster Tournament, quarter finals at the second half of the Long Beach swing and octa finals of the first half of the Long beach Swing and Both halves of the Mile High swing.
2006-
The team of Kyle Dennis and Justin Hingtgen went undefeated in preliminary rounds (including a win over the William Jewel Round Robin’s champions) and cleared to the top 16 teams in one of the toughest season openers in the country with teams from all over the nation in attendance. After doing so well as to earn a bye through Double Octo Finals, the Dawgs lost a narrow round to a strong team from Washburn on a 2-1 decision. Kyle received special notice as the eighth best speaker out of all participants at the entire tournament.
Ariel Rodgers, a returning sophomore, and Katie Thomas, a new recruit from Colorado, have been invited to the prestigious William Jewel Round Robin—where ten of the best teams in debate get to duke it out for an early, but important, championship amongst some of the nation’s strongest competition. This marks the second year in a row that the Dawgs have been invited to compete in this round robin.
More updates coming as we attend more tournaments and as invitations are given out!
2005-
The debate team had an outstanding first year of competition. We were invited to three different round-robin style tournaments. These tournaments only invited who they considered to be the best 10 debate teams in the country. Two were first semester, The Claremont Colleges, and William Jewell College, and the final round-robin tournament was held second semester at Point Loma Nazarene University. These prestigious tournaments are considered to be the benchmark for debate programs. Any school getting invitations to one, let alone all three, is seen as one of the top Parliamentary Debate programs in the country.
Teams from SIU cleared into the elimination round of debates at open invitation tournaments such as Claremont’s National Open, Creighton, and CSU Fullerton. Our finest showings were at Colorado College, where SIU was the only undefeated team and top seeded team for the elimination debates. We advanced all the way to the semi-final debate before losing a close decision to the always tough and skilled Willamette University. The other feather in our cap for the 2005-2006 season was the open invitation tournament at William Jewell College. With a national field of over 70 teams from across the country, SIU advanced all the way to the final round, where we defeated the team from Loyola (which has been ranked as the best team in the nation). This meant that SIU was the champion of a large national circuit tournament in only our first year of Parliamentary Debate competition. |
