Team Spotlight: Lynbrook High School
LYNBROOK, CA – Victory Briefs Daily exists to foster a community that brings together debaters, coaches, parents, and alumni from across the country. Team Spotlight features programs from across the country — schools that compete locally, statewide, and/or nationally — and celebrates the great students, great coaches, and great teams that make this activity possible. This week, I’ll be featuring a Team Spotlight every day. For today’s piece, I was able to chat with David McGinnis to learn more about the forensics program at Lynbrook High School.
PROGRAM: Lynbrook High School
BASE OF OPERATIONS: Lynbrook, CA
DIRECTOR OF FORENSICS: David McGinnis (LD)
ASSISTANT COACHES: Brian Ogata (Interps), Mike Baer (Parliamentary Debate)
NUMBER OF ACTIVE MEMBERS: About 200
EVENTS: “Everything.”
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CURRENT STRENGTH OF NFL CHAPTER: 507 Degrees
DEGREES LAST YEAR: 157
DEGREES THIS YEAR: 172
DISTRICT: California Coast
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Jon Cruz: What has been your proudest achievement as a coach?
Dave McGinnis: Managing to coach a natioanally competitive team while still building a family.
JC: What is the most important issue facing the debate community today?
DM: Lack of qualified coaching. More students need to go into the education field.
JC: If you could change one thing about forensics, what would it be?
DM: I would clone Pam Cady Wycoff and put one of her in every school in the country. This would drastically increase both quality of competition and level of participation.
JC: Tell us a little bit about the history of debate at Lynbrook High School.
DM: The origins of the Lynbrook High School Speech and Debate team are lost in the misty recesses of time. Its NFL chapter was founded by Shirley Keller-Firestone in the 1960s. The team quickly became a powerhouse. It continued successful into the late 1990s, increasing its level of competition under the tutelage of Michaela Northrop, who poured endless hours of dedicated teaching and coaching into the program, upping the game to the point where Lynbrook was one of the top NFL chapters in the nation with over 700 members and degress. After Ms. Northrup left, the program was shepherded to further successes by Ms. Vivian Chien, who decided to retire from coaching in 2005. Since then, the team, made up of top-notch and highly independent students, has managed to continue to develop highly-skilled speakers and debaters despite the modest talents of its current director.
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Tripti Bhattacharya writes:
“Lynbrook’s team is largely a community: I met most of my friends in high school through speech and debate, and I think teaching one another, sharing both failures and successes has contributed to some really awesome friendships. In addition to being competitively successful, I like the fact that our team is structured to also emphasis learning and critical thinking. Debate practice devolves into various people arguing about deontology or Foucault, which can be both informative and entertaining.”
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19 Responses to “Team Spotlight: Lynbrook High School”
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Posted from: 67.161.35.149
June 6th, 2006 19:55
i gotta say lynbrook’s awesome.
Posted from: 67.124.225.133
June 6th, 2006 20:07
lynbrook rep. cali hege next yr f00s
Posted from: 203.14.53.45
June 6th, 2006 20:10
fgj fgjgf jgfjfgj
Posted from: 172.195.174.91
June 6th, 2006 20:55
west coast ‘07
Posted from: 71.132.153.191
June 6th, 2006 21:43
west>east
mmhmm…
Posted from: 68.252.249.128
June 6th, 2006 22:05
pimps
Posted from: 67.164.79.91
June 6th, 2006 22:35
I love Lynbrook
Posted from: 198.174.17.254
June 7th, 2006 09:00
lynbrook ppl rock. woot.
Posted from: 12.217.99.84
June 7th, 2006 10:17
tripti = legit
Posted from: 68.98.184.24
June 7th, 2006 13:29
congrats, Lynbrook!!!
:o)
Posted from: 68.98.184.24
June 7th, 2006 13:30
Go Lynbrook! (I’m only slightly biased).
How freaky that we are now moving to the Highland Park area of St. Paul.
Posted from: 70.110.23.46
June 7th, 2006 17:39
Baer is still my hero
Posted from: 216.100.32.10
June 7th, 2006 18:18
lynbrook is one of my favorite teams in the country. They’re a bunch of people whose talent is matched only by their awesomeness, and well deserving of national recognition.
~Ankur
Posted from: 67.188.94.50
June 7th, 2006 18:44
Lynbrook is also a team of very very very NICE people :) I love all of you guys…
high school district and cfl love :)
Posted from: 63.193.118.145
June 8th, 2006 00:11
lots of lynbrook love, and also one clarification: northrop, not northrup.
this team has become my family, and i’ll miss you all more than i can say.
- lynbrook sm
Posted from: 67.124.225.133
June 8th, 2006 22:43
it’s spelled right the first time lol
Posted from: 147.202.17.18
August 2nd, 2006 07:35
Tripti is a very nice person. Her comment was somewhat falacous though.
As anyone knows that the majority of lynbrook runs team cases. I believe this is not educational because:
1. They will not know how to properly formulate arguments in response to their oppenents case if that person runs a unique position that they do not have blocked out, preventing them from competitive success. For example at novice nationals (iowa) the team ran a case about nuclear war. They were successful in prelims but it ended up hurting them for two reasons.
A. Judges had heard the argument so many times that it was just repetative, and eventually they started dropping it, or they gave a paradigm about how if you run that argument it will kill your speaks.
B. Every team had heard the argument and decided to majorly block it out, so that the lynbrookians would not advance very far in outrounds.
2. They will not be able argue the case that dave made for them because they might not fully comprehend what it says or how it functions within the round. To use the same example at novice nationals i was judging a lynbrook kid that extended that argument through 6 response. Those responses took out the link from ED to nuc. war but the kid said life was a prereq. to everything, thus apriori and their sole voting issue, which is invalid for two reasons.
A.The correct term would be Prima Facie (or however it is spelt) and the term apriori acording to kant is expierence learned from knowledge or whatever it is hard to explaind, which the kid made no link into.
B. Even if i accept that life is a prereq. to anything and everything i still wouldn’t affirm because the links were taken out and the case was mostly taken out. This is supposed to emphasize that the novices don’t know how things properly function.
Tripti said, “I like the fact that our team is structured to also emphasis learning and critical thinking” but i would for the most part disagree because there is another way that is more educational.
1. Get the kids into small groups with one varsity member and have them go through case ideas and maybe a brief outline, so as to avoid the novices getting frustrated but they will still be able to know the idea of the case and will obtain the skill of case writing but still have the spirit to keep debating.
OR just talk with them and let them work the case out THEN critique it so they will eventually become self-suficient
Your best lynbrook.
Posted from: 216.100.32.10
August 2nd, 2006 10:43
i don’t care to get into a flame war, but…speaking as someone who’s had the pleasure of being at tournaments with the lynbrook kids for 4 years, if you seriously think that everyone runs team cases and doesn’t think, your information seems a bit flawed. dave’s awesome, but it’s not as though tripti, karthik, cynthia et all are just drones for him, so…chill.
Posted from: 68.221.197.58
August 2nd, 2006 13:00
“The correct term would be Prima Facie (or however it is spelt) and the term apriori acording to kant is expierence learned from knowledge or whatever it is hard to explaind, which the kid made no link into.”
its really embarrassing to criticize someone else’s use of a word that you can neither spell nor define (although “a priori” is very frequently used incorrectly in debate)