Westview Closes Out Silverton Fox Invitational

Over the weekend of November 10th, Westview’s Advaith Nair & Austin Wang closed out Silverton Fox Invitational with their teammates Ethan Hiser & Matthew Friar. In semifinals, both teams affirmed the resolution that “When in conflict, student's [sic] First Amendment rights may be limited to protect other students from abuse.” 

According to champion Advaith Nair, the resolution’s phrase “may be” ended up causing “lots of framing issues.” However, both Westview teams managed to overcome the grammatical challenge in their semifinal round. Nair & Wang defeated their teammates Sreetej Kalapatapu & Roshun Sunder on a 2-1 decision while Westview’s Hiser & Friar championed over OES’s Nicholas Nautiyal & Cheney Sung on a 3-0 decision. 

The day-long invitational included three preliminary rounds and semifinals, with 25 open debaters and 20 novices making up the parliamentary debate field. Since Silverton’s registration closed three weeks before the tournament was scheduled to begin, Sandy High School held a tournament for all the students who couldn’t attend Silverton but wanted to debate. That created an unusual parli field at Silverton, according to Southridge’s Arian Ghorbani, who noted that Wilson and Cleveland teams were noticeably absent. 

Silverton lacked resolutions with “this house” as the actor, which allowed for more clarity and predictability in the debate rounds—since the affirmation couldn’t define this house as the actor that most benefited them. However, champion Austin Wang commented that, “not only was there a heavy aff bias in almost all of the topics,” but  “a lot of times the resolution was essentially a fact that was either objectively true or not true, leaving most of the debate to be focused around definitions and interpretations.”

Multiple competitors commented on the lack of experienced judges in preliminary rounds, noting there were only a few experienced judges who were also coaches in the pool. However, champion Advaith noted that he appreciated having three judges in his elimination round to check back for the majority of inexperienced judges, which isn’t guaranteed at other Oregon invitationals. 

The largest complaint about the tournament, as explained by champion Austin and echoed by other competitors, was “the fact that numerous grammatical errors were found in the resolutions” like the semifinal resolution earlier in this article, which “demonstrated a lack of forethought.” However, it was noted that the tournament did run on time, which they had been unable to do in previous years.


SEMIFINALS

Westview Advaith Nair & Austin Wang def. Westview Sreetej Kalapatapu & Roshun Sunder (2-1)

Westview Ethan Hiser & Matthew Friar def. OES Nicholas Nautiyal & Cheney Sung (3-0)


Full results here