Juneau high school debaters host final regional tournament of season
- Ellie Ruel
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Juneau wins overall drama, debate, forensics categories; Sitka takes final debate title
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
About 100 Southeast high schoolers matched wits during the final Region V Drama, Debate, and Forensics tournament at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé before the statewide competition later this month.
“I mean, this is an exciting tournament for kids, right?” said Corrine Marks, co-coach of the Juneau team. “They're nervous about whether or not they're qualified for state. This tournament doesn't determine if they qualify. It's different from cross country. But it is sort of their last chance to show that they should go.”
Marks sat at the volunteer judge sign-in table, across from the wall where schedules and results were posted periodically, pointing students and coaches in the right direction.
The tournament consisted of 13 events, ranging from dramatic acting to speeches and a public forum debate, each held in different classroom wings. Students ran from room to room, standing at sticker-covered lecterns in front of whiteboards, surrounded by classroom decor such as motivational posters, as they delivered speeches on everything from the state of media to governmental systems.
“They tell each other where they are, they don’t tell me,” joked Juneau co-coach Keenan Miller as he tried to track down competitors.
Between events, JDHS senior Alivia Gomez and sophomore Maddie Bass chatted with teammates in the JDHS commons. The area had turned into a landing zone for props, snacks and notes as competitors prepped for their events.
“It's been pretty up and down, which tournaments usually are,” Gomez said. “There's definitely, like, the low points where it's only disappointing, and then there's really fun stuff.”
Gomez won first place for her informative speech on the Electoral College, and she and debate partner Rain Turley represented the school in the final round of Public Forum Debate, as well as taking first place in Improvisational Duet Acting. Bass had also quarterfinaled in the debate category and was part of a reader’s theatre group that won second place. Neither knew if they would take the stage for the final debate until shortly before the round started.
“Since we've already done about six debate rounds, most people already have a handle on what people's cases look like, so it's supposed to be, like, really improv,” Gomez explained.
Both students agreed that their favorite part of DDF was the community it built. Bass said she met most of her closest friends in the club, including Gomez. The two also shared a role as a student debater in Perseverance Theatre’s “What the Constitution Means to Me” last fall.
“We don't judge each other,” Bass said. “We're able to help each other through growth, and we're able to honor each other's love in the arts in this space, public school, where the arts community isn’t as valued as it used to be. I think this is a space where we can all come together to share our collective love of acting and speech and debate.”
“It's kind of like self-commitment,” Gomez added. “Nobody's really holding you accountable but yourself. It's kind of nice to improve on those things and constantly work towards it, having a meet once monthly, getting to perform in front of other people. It’s a lot of things that most of us haven’t been exposed to.”
The coaches said watching their students’ growth is one of the more rewarding parts of their multifaceted jobs.
“The single thing I like the most is when students begin to see the same potential in themselves that we, as coaches, have seen in them all along,” said coach Jamie Marks.
He and his wife, Corrine, have been coaching the team for 10 years now. They taught Miller in DDF when he went to Thunder Mountain High School, who is now in his first year coaching.
“It's been funny for me to realize the care and effort that Jamie and Corrine, who were my coaches, have put in, and put in for 10 years. It really helped me appreciate the energy that coaching takes,” Miller said.
He said he enjoyed watching students find the “aha” moment when they’re working on a piece, since all of the events boil down to “how well you can tell a story.”
For both coaches, seeing those skills spill over into other areas is also rewarding.
“Our main goal is to get people to be better communicators and have good civil discourse,” Jamie Marks explained.
The topics students tackle often don’t shy away from national controversy. This year, the public forum debate resolution was about whether the Federal Trade Commission should adopt a formal regulatory framework for sports betting. Juneau’s Alivia Gomez and Rain Turley argued for the negation, while Sitka High School’s Angela Bahna and Francis Myers argued the affirmative.
Sitka argued that current patchworks of differing legislation by states regulating sports betting was ineffective.
“The lack of uniformity creates situations in which individuals in one state are subject to a completely different set of rules of protection that are across the border, allowing people to exploit these discrepancies involved,” Bahna said while presenting the affirmation’s argument.
Juneau argued that a top-down framework would only drive gamblers into illegal settings and ignored complexities between states.
“History shows federal agencies move slower and struggle to update policies effectively. So rather than doing more, the federal government would likely replace over 30 developing regulations across the country with a single rigid regulator,” said Turley, presenting the counterargument.
In a 2-3 vote by judges, Sitka’s team won the overall debate.
“I'm feeling good. I think there was a lot of good stuff that happened, things to improve on, but we’ve got state in a month, so we’ve got time,” Myers said after the debate.
This was the second-to-last tournament of Sitka High School freshman Lola Hitchcock’s first year of DDF. Her favorite piece was a reader’s theatre titled “Your Brain on Social Media.”
“It's a comedic piece, but we're saying the real-world problems of social media,” Hitchcock said.
Hitchcock said being at a different school to compete was a somewhat similar experience to meets in Sitka, but trips brought the team together more.
“When you're at your own home meet you can go and sleep in your own bed,” she said. “There's a lot more team bonding on trips when we go away from our school because we're together a lot.”
Individual speeches also focused on current topics, such as Juneau sophomore Mazelle Joseph’s extemporaneous speech on the decline of local journalism and the importance of local media to combat the rise in misinformation. She drew on personal experience, citing local coverage of a protest against the Alaska LNG project she participated in.
“Local journalism is needed because they are closest to their communities. A federal government reporting news or AI is not going to help those people in their communities,” Joseph said in her speech.
Sillier popular culture tidbits showed up across the drama events, with command performances of readers’ theatre pieces satirizing religious summer camps and Monty Python featured during the awards ceremony.
Noah Coleman, Dane Hubert and Dylan DeAsis performed a first-place exaggerated pantomime of the recent Louvre heist, set to elevator music.
Hubert’s mother, Paula Hubert, stopped by to watch some of his events.
“It’s so fun to watch them. They’re so creative and dynamic, and they're so brave, to be able to get up there like they do, or just, like, creativity beyond anything I've ever seen. And to be able to memorize all the things you have to memorize,” she said. “He's done it for four years, so he's a senior, so we're sad that it's over.”
“I feel more confident, just knowing she’s in the room,” Hubert said.
Hubert said he appreciated the mash-up of people he met in the club.
“You've heard of speech and debate, and they often have one of these stoic, serious research debaters are doing. And then there's drama clubs, and they have kind of these bizarre, fun people that enjoy creative stuff. And DDF is this really combination of all of that,” he said.
The awards ceremony also served as a senior night for graduating club members from all eight participating schools. Students received personalized tributes, with stories or factoids from their DDF stints.
For Maddox Rogers of Haines High School, this meant a ceremonially adopted adult orangutan and a stuffed animal modelled after a puppet show script he had written in elementary school.
“This tournament, I think, went amazing. It's just so nice to see everybody come together. It's bittersweet, being my second-to-last meet ever,” he said. “I think this week is a great example of the incredible community that DDF builds. and seeing hard work and spending time pay off, and just how we can lift each other up.”
The state tournament is scheduled Feb. 26-28 in Anchorage.
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
