From the Archives: Standards of Excellence

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — I begin 2008 by looking to the past: that is, the past archives of Victory Briefs Daily on my computer. Some early material has been lost in the shuffle as we’ve moved servers or restarted the site, and specifically, a number of interviews conducted on Saturday6AM — an online portal that was folded back into VBD some time ago — seemed lost to the ages. This became apparent to me personally when I received an e-mail from a reader who was trying to find an interview that I conducted with Marilee Dukes — recognized by many as the most successful Lincoln-Douglas Debate coach in the history of the event — in 2006. The issues discussed in this interview are as timely as ever, so let a new discussion begin. And stay tuned for interviews, both new and old, over the next few weeks!

She coached debaters to win many prestigious titles: the Glenbrooks, the New York City Invitational, and the MBA, Bronx, and Glenbrook Round Robins. She coached twelve champions of the Homewood Patriot Classic. She coached two champions of the St. Mark’s Heart of Texas Invitational, three champions of the Barkley Forum for High Schools, and five champions of the Wake National Earlybird. She coached seven students to the Top Eight at Nationals; under her guidance, Vestavia Hills High School claimed an unprecedented two national championships in Lincoln-Douglas Debate. She was the first person to coach National Champions in both LD and Policy. Finally, her debaters have claimed the Walter Alan Ulrich Top Speaker Award at the Tournament of Champions three times; indeed, she has coached students to finals at the TOC an unprecedented six times. They have won it twice. (Those students were also top seed and top speaker.) Countless people have, with good reason, named her the most successful Lincoln-Douglas Debate coach in the history of the event. She is Marilee Dukes, the former director of the nationally-renowned program at Vestavia Hills High School in Birmingham, Alabama.

Jon Cruz: Thanks for joining me for this interview. I get suggestions for interviews every day and while I’ve never kept an exact count, I think you may be the all-time most requested interview among coaches. That’s not much of a shock, of course, given that the vast majority of people I have asked agree that you compiled the finest coaching record in the history of Lincoln-Douglas Debate.

How did you get involved in high school debate?

Marilee Dukes: We had a debate unit in a speech course I took in high school. I found it exciting and debated for my high school my junior and senior years. Of course, since I’m older than God, we did not have much competition — just district and state. My high school debate coach was married to the college coach at the university I chose to attend, so I ended up with a scholarship. It was never my intention to coach in high school; I just wanted to teach English. However, the school where I began teaching noticed my debate experience and pushed me into it. I was in and out for a few years, but ended up sticking with it. The truth is I found it intellectually stimulating — a break from reading papers written by high school students. I, frankly, just plain enjoyed debate from the time I was a high school sophomore.

I came to Vestavia in the fall of 1983. I had been in charge of both debate and theatre at Hattiesburg High School in Mississippi, which is my home. We had good support, but I was driving to Alabama all the time to compete. Also, most of my friends were in Alabama. So I made some applications in the Birmingham area, and Vestavia Hills came up. At the time, Vestavia had an assistant superintendent who had debated during the years when the University of Alabama had an exceptional debate team — Annabell Hagood was a legendary coach. This assistant superintendent had also coached as a young teacher and really wanted the system to have a debate program. They had limped along with the “assigned new teacher” coaching and really wanted to hire someone with experience. When my application crossed her desk, she jumped at it — even interviewed me on a Sunday morning because I just happened to be passing through Birmingham on that day.

We started with seven kids; the next year we had twenty-eight and won the state championship. From then on, the program grew and we needed to go beyond Alabama to get academic challenge for our students.

JC: What were your initial goals as a coach?

MD: initially, and probably to the end, I just wanted kids to gain the enormous educational benefits from the activity. I felt that debate had made my academic career vastly easier than it would have been otherwise, and I wanted to do for kids what someone had done for me. I’m sure i would sound foolish if I did not admit that I am a pretty competitive person. However, I never really pushed my kids to win, just to do their best. Then, I got lucky and ended up in a school with students who were naturally competitive and smart. Believe it or not, however, I enjoyed the kids who were not my big winners as much as those who were.

JC: Vestavia Hills High School remains, perhaps, the most successful LD program of all time. When did you first know your team was going to be a “name” in the activity?

MD: I never really thought of my team as a “name.” I did realize that we were going to be pretty good about the third year I was here. The team grew very rapidly and the kids worked very hard. During that year, I took my novice policy debate teams to what was then
the Glenbrook South Tournament. We met each other in semis and won the tournament. At that point, I was pretty convinced that we would be competitive at most “national” tournaments.

JC: How aware was the school of the accomplishments? I would imagine the administration must have been very supportive of the team.

MD: I have to give my administration credit for rare support. There was not as much money from the school as I thought we might get, but the local Rotary Club began having a fundraiser to support us and our very fine math team. By the time I left the Rotary donation was over $15,000. At the same time, our principal, Michael Gross, did everything he could to clear a path for me to do whatever I needed to do. Few schools have had the administrative and community support that we had. They praised our accomplishments as much as athletic accomplishment.

JC: You didn’t intend to build up a “name” team, but you did, and you did so quickly. Was there a pressure to live up to your success year after year, and if so, how did you deal with it? I think that’s something coaches deal with all the time.

MD Absolutely, there was pressure. I will never forget the night I was helping to set up for the fund raiser the Rotary Club did for us. I thanked one of the men for their support (and it was amazing). His response to me was, we are more than happy to help you. You just need to keep winning. I made some quip, and he responded, no really. That’s how you get our attention. Personally, I think that people who tell you that they don’t care if they win will lie to themselves about other things too. While I do think I managed to keep from pressuring my kids to win, I will have to say that I had to be very deliberate about that. It’s much more fun to win than to lose. We did not lose the Homewood tournament very often. I remember the first time we came in second, waking up on Sunday and realizing that the world did not come to an end. Those losing experiences were good for me.

I suppose the most difficult part of the “pressure” was that the kids must have felt an incredible amount of pressure to measure up to their teammates. I’m not sure how successful I was with my story to my team, but I was at least consistent. I spent time early each year and again in the middle reminding them that debate has a different purpose for different people and that every person can make a contribution whether winning debates is part of the calculus or not. I talked about research skills that helped all of us as well as the individual. I talked about the critical thinking skills. We always analyzed topics as a group. I always tried to praise the idea that came from the student who rarely won. I think probably I didn’t do anything that most educators don’t do. I just was very deliberate about it.

JC: Debate has important intellectual ends, as you’ve noted. Were there ever times where you felt like the competitive ends of debate conflicted greatly with the educational ends? How did you resolve this conflict?

MD: I’m afraid that I did, and still do, feel that competition has interfered with education. To be perfectly honest, I tend to believe that a desire to win is feeding much of game playing today. Too many kids feel they can’t beat a good debater who can expose argument to truth and validity, so they use tricks to catch the opponent off guard. I question the educational value of this. I also tend to believe that coaches must bear a large part of the responsibility for this. Of course, I realize that students will frequently run arguments that their coaches have not seen and did not approve. I know of at least one of my debaters who would show me one case then run junk in rounds. However, many coaches have never even read cases. They need to say to kids, nope, this has no educational value; you can’t run it.

How did I avoid it? I’m sure I always did. I will say that my debaters will assure you that they did not feel pressure to win from me. We worked very hard to win Homewood, and I did pressure them to give a huge team effort there. But that was all. All I ever asked was that they do their best. That was good enough for me. I’m not sure that I’m so noble that I could have felt that way if they were not such good little debaters. I certainly do not take credit for the fact that Vestavia had a number of winning debaters. My standard for determining the educational value of their arguments was, what would my principal say if he listened to them debate? If he would have questioned the value of the activity, I wasn’t going to have the money to compete, so I figured that was a pretty good standard.

JC: From the sounds of it, Vestavia was very committed to local and regional debate, even with a busy schedule that took your students across America. I think it is extraordinarily important for programs that compete nationally to support debate locally. How did your school
interact with other programs in the area?

MD: We went to everything in our state. My team was always very large, so I could send different kids to different competitions. As a part of their grade, they had to attend all the competitions in Birmingham. I did feel a commitment to debate in my state. Selfishly, my program benefited from having other good programs in the area. Some of the other teams liked us; some of them hated us.

JC: Many have given you personally credit for the evolution of the activity into one that evaluates arguments within a framework particular to the activity itself. Do you feel you and your students helped define the activity? And if so, how?

MD: Did we “help” define the activity? Probably so. However, one cannot underestimate the contributions made by others. In fact, Pat Bailey, my chief competitor but close friend from over the mountain in Homewood, Alabama, made an incredible contribution at the same time that I was coaching. Together, Pat and I tried to cut the “oratorical” LD style into something that was more of a “debate.” I was a policy debater, so was accustomed to direct refutation and denial of the truth of an argument, as opposed to the “my side is better” approach. What we wanted to do was keep the compelling rhetoric while dealing directly with the issues inherent in the resolution and the issues raised by the other debater.

JC: In terms of “dealing directly with the issues inherent in the resolution,” does that mean that debaters should draw mainly from topic-specific authors, rather than a specific canon of philosophers, or is there room for both? And if so, what’s the balance?

MD: While every topic demands something different, my general approach was that students should use a philosophy(er) (I’m not sure that “specific canon” is appropriate because any reasonable philosophy that incorporated the issues in the resolution seemed appropriate to me.) as a basis for the position and then use topic specific authors in the case as they applied to the philosophical position.

JC: To move back to my original question, specifically, many credit you with popularizing the “value structure” of the value premise and criterion. Is this accurate? And, if so, what was your reasoning for supporting this type of framework?

MD: I have never understood why I was credited and/or blamed for this. Dale McCall developed this approach. I never felt married to the value premise/criterion structure. Did I like it when it was handled well? Absolutely. Did I teach it at institutes as a unifying device? You bet. I did and do believe that this structure gave LD some “standards.” Policy debate has specific burdens that the affirmative has to meet in order to win. If the aff could not solve, for example, it could not win. Because there was no “status quo” and no “plan” to defend in LD, there seemed to be a need for some kind of standard a judge would use as a basis for decision.

The VP/CR provided that standard. If the debater used it well, it was a good standard.

However, when these items were just something a debater stuck at the top of the case and then ignored, they were pretty useless. I always really hated it when a coach told his/her debater to “stick in” a value structure for me because I thought it was sacred. I would have much preferred to just ignore it from the beginning.

JC: Aaron Timmons mentioned in an interview with VBD that what he called the “Dukes/Bailey” style of LD was less a direct response to earlier, oratorical styles and more a compromise between said style and a “policy lite” type of LD that had become prevalent in some circles by the late 80s. Did you see it that way?

MD: I’m not quite sure what Aaron means by “policy lite.” I’ve never heard the term before. I assume he means that there was a style of LD that was more line-by-line. I can’t really say that I saw my approach as a compromise between the two styles. However, Aaron may well be right that that is the way things played out. I can remember the really early LD debates that I heard, and I really did not like them. As a debater, I found them terribly boring. The two debaters usually ignored each other’s arguments; they just expanded their own arguments as the round progressed. It was more of an oratory/extemp challenge than debate. I just plain refused to do it. Pat Bailey was less than fifteen minutes from us in Homewood and was moving toward LD. She wanted competitors and talked me into trying LD and adding more “debate” to it. So that’s what she and I both did with our kids. As time passed, clash became more important; however, we hung on to the oratorical aspect of have a case position on both sides. When we taught in institutes in the early years, we found that the kids from Texas, who rarely debated the NFL topics at that time, were frequently debating more resolutions of fact. That may be Timmons’ reference. I don’t know.

After I moved onto the national circuit and got to know the Bronx Science kids, they seemed to be doing pretty much what we were doing. Before that, the New York and Florida kids were generally more oratorical; Texas more “policy.” We did try to develop a case structure and style that would work for us in both areas so that we would be able to simply revise cases as we went across the country instead of having to totally start over each week. Maybe that’s what Timmons was talking about.

JC: Were there any particular philosophers, schools of thought, or other debate approaches which you feel your program helped to pioneer in LD?

MD: I don’t really think so. We were early in the use of what we called observations which we saw as an argument that came at the top of an aff case designed to keep the neg from debating the far extreme of the topic. Of course, the observation grew into a totally different animal.

JC: You’ve coached some of the most successful competitors in the history of the activity. What makes a great Lincoln-Douglas debater?

MD: That’s a hard one because debaters are certainly different. The one quality I felt my more successful debaters had was a willingness to work. They read constantly. These were, of course, very smart people. I was also impressed by their ability to use the language. As communicators, they were exceptional.

JC: What types of changes did you witness in the activity and among debaters over your many years at Vestavia?

MD: The “flow” became more and more important. During the middle of my career, the speed of the activity increased. I’m afraid I will have to take at least some of the credit or blame for that one. However, by the time a retired, far too many LD debaters were virtually unintelligible. Aaron Timmons and I are on the same page on that one; speed is fine as long as I can understand what you’re saying. I personally much prefer a few smart, well developed arguments to simply trying to overwhelm an opponent with numbers of arguments.

JC: Why would you take “at least some credit or blame” for fast debate? Were some of your debaters at Vestavia very fast? The common stereotype today of the “Vestavia debater” would indicate otherwise, but then, that’s perhaps the problem with stereotypes.

MD: Compared to the blur of speed that characterizes today’s LD debates, my kids were crawling. However, for their time, they were pretty quick. Watch a tape of Claire Carman’s Nationals debate in 1994, and you will see what I mean. Hetal Doshi was very fast. We were frequently criticized for the speed. However, they were always intelligible. I will say that we worked very hard on word economy. One of the 1AR drills I did with my top kids was to have them re-do the 1AR using the same arguments, speaking at the same speed, but cutting their time until they could give the same speech in 2 min. That required word economy — good for them educationally also.

JC: In terms of other changes?

MD: We moved from the more oratorical style to the more confrontational debate style. By the time I retired, debaters were using more “stock” arguments. Some kids used the same negative all year long; I understand that’s still popular.

I have been disappointed by the fact that LDers have become more and more rude in rounds and sometimes outside [rounds as well]. I can remember my policy debate friends commenting on how nice the LDers were. Now, they are saying just the opposite.

JC: I am in total agreement, and I am surprised when debaters are surprised when I bring up rudeness in oral critiques. Judges provide a service, and the idea that they should have to blindly tolerate or excuse a rude attitude would make me laugh if it weren’t so frustrating to sit through.

Let us turn back for a moment to your background in policy. Many say that LD is becoming dangerously “like policy.” But while many critics of certain trends in LD point to your debaters as models of good debate, you’ve indicated that your policy background helped inform your LD coaching. Besides the lack of clarity demonstrated by many debaters — something about which I am in complete agreement with you — what are other “policy” trends LD should be avoiding, and why?

MD: I almost hate to answer this question for fear of setting off a firestorm of comment that I do not intend to invite. However, I am bothered by the trend away from discussing the issues that are inherent in the resolution and using almost what I consider a “canned” approach; i.e., using the same kritik for every negative for years. I think this discourages thought, avoids the issues in the resolution and focuses on game playing. I just have issues with anything that is counter to educational value, and some of this really is. I personally do not care for the negative that has no case but simply attacks the aff. Again, there is no status quo for the aff to defend in LD; debaters are supposed to pit values in conflict. I think the neg has a burden of proof, just like the aff. Neg needs to defend a value. A neg that simply refutes the aff has not defended a value. You must remember that I have heard few debate rounds in the last 5 years so there may be other issues that I am either not remembering or have not seen. There are so many wonderful approaches to argument that are a part of policy debate. I hate to see LD absorb things that are not necessarily the best aspects.

JC: You mentioned kritiks. As a policy coach, and a major figure in the development of LD, do you think they’re valid arguments in LD? Why or why not?

MD: As a general rule, I am not a fan of the kritik. However, I think you and I probably agree that there are times when kritiks may be applicable and valid arguments in the LD debate. When they are topic-specific, fine. However, I have serious questions about the educational value of arguments that are used, in the same form, over and over on different resolutions. A little blip that provides a loose link to the resolution does not constitute originality. Also, I find some of these arguments to be absurd. As staunch as I am about women’s rights, I am downright offended by some of the feminist kritiks that I have heard and/or heard about. As a woman, I sometimes feel that these arguments tend to take real issues faced by real women and trivialize them. To the extent that similar issues are raised by other kritiks, I would have the same objection. While I am not a fan of the kritik even in the policy debate, I do think the kritik works better in the policy arena because the impact of current events on the policy debate forces the debater to do some independent work. I am, frankly, horrified by the idea that large numbers of kids are reading arguments written by other people, and they are doing nothing in the way of independent thinking. This has happened in policy, and it is happening in LD. As an educator, I would rather see a kid run a bad argument that she or he wrote himself or herself than to read a good argument written by someone at an institute. One of the great objections many of my friends in policy debate have to the kritik is that so many kids are just reading material that they do not understand. I think that point applies doubly in LD.

I want to say here that I have been very disappointed that in an educational community like debate the discussion that has developed during the last several years over the validity/value of kritiks has been so ad hominem. I frequently get the impression that far too many debaters and their teachers maintain that those who don’t agree with them pro or con about the kritik are somehow either evil or stupid. Institutes that either do or do not support the kritik are either stupid or evil. Now that I am no longer associated with an institute in any way, I feel free to say that I am appalled at the kind of “let’s get _______” attitude that seems to have grown from this type of argumentation. Actions and attitudes such as these tend to indict the argumentation positions themselves. Plenty of people who are both good and intelligent frequently do not agree with all of us. And, the truth is, half the time the basis for the attacks is simply incorrect. This is debate, for goodness sake. We are supposed to have reasonable discussion, not call each other names! We are supposed to respect that most ideas are truly debatable.

JC: When I was in high school, I read many debate articles, in the Rostrum and elsewhere. Perhaps the one that had the greatest impact on my own views about debate was one you wrote entitled “Please! Don’t Ask Me to Think!” In my first year of coaching, I learned that this article had similarly affected many other coaches, both those just starting out and those who had been in the activity for years. What prompted you to write this piece?

MD: The answer to that is probably way too obvious. I found that I was intervening in decisions because the debaters just finished the line-by-line and sat down. If debaters have used an effective value structure as a basis for debate, I can make a reasonably fair decision anyway; however, that situation was rare. I just thought debaters failed to take the thirty seconds to one minute to win the round. I have always believed that effective communication of any kind is about mind control. The communicator needs to speak/write in such a clear and compelling manner that the “audience” gets pulled into the thinking of the speaker/writer. A good communicator wants the audience to think later, not during the communication. Far too often debaters gave up so much ground by allowing the judge to decide which issues are important. If a debater effectively points the judge to arguments he/she is winning, the debater controls the judge instead of allowing intervention. At the same time, I think the longer a judge takes to make a decision the greater the chance that the judge loses touch with what really happened in the round.

JC: I think one of the most profound passages in your article comes when you talk about the importance of essentially “writing the ballot” for the judge. It is an important statement about the necessity of creating a decision-making calculus for the critic:

“With any topic that is debatable, each side will win some issues. It becomes critical that the individual debater explain to the judge why the arguments that he is winning are more important than the arguments being won by the other debater. Simply covering the flow leaves room for judge intervention, for the judge to decide which arguments are more believable and more important.”

Sadly, I am shocked at the amount of intervention most of the rounds I judge require because debaters simply fail to prioritize issues, clearly explain the impacts of said issues, and, most importantly, weigh. I’m particularly alarmed by the blippy jargon that many debaters attempt to pass off as weighing. What do you feel makes for the best weighing of arguments?

MD: I could probably write another article about this question. I’m not sure I can give you a good short answer. Briefly, good debaters need to know their judges and what they believe and work from there. I think honesty is very important in making decisions for weighing a debate. The debater must admit to herself which arguments she is winning and which ones she is losing. Then the focus of the weighing needs to be why the ones he is winning have greater impact than the ones he is losing. Of course, designing a case with the end of the debate in mind is necessary. I also think the debater needs to look the judge in the eye and say what you want written on the ballot in the RFD space.

JC: You accomplished so much as a coach. What was your proudest achievement?

MD: Easy — my first NFL diamond, because that particular award represented the efforts of every debater and individual events competitor who had come through my program.

JC: Debaters are always clamoring to read “war stories.” Do you have any particular memories of rounds you judged, or rounds in which your students participated, that stick out?

MD: I was not in the round when Jason Baldwin won the TOC, but I loved the story about his round. The topic was spirit of the law vs. letter of the law. (I don’t remember the wording.) In cross-ex, Jason asked his opponent [Carlos Gonzalez of Florida’s Christopher Columbus High School] to assume that his flow pad was the spirit of the law. Then he dropped it on the floor and asked what it was doing. Apparently, this was a bit comical and illustrated his point that the spirit of the law needed to be codified to be useful. No, I did not tell him to do that.

One of the more amusing experiences I had while judging came when a student offered to show me an article about the use of value premises so that I could understand the concept. The whole story is much more amusing, but would certainly embarrass the student if she read it.

JC: What were your favorite tournaments? Any particular reasons for picking them?

MD: Homewood was the only tournament where I could enter my entire team. Thus, Homewood became the tournament where we wanted to win the sweepstakes award. The huge team effort provided an impetus for the kids to do well the rest of the year. It was also a very well run tournament.

I can’t say that enjoyed one of the national tournaments more than another. I always enjoyed the Glenbrooks, Big Bronx, St. Mark’s, MBA, Emory, and TOC. Judging was good. Most important, I always enjoyed the people. Don’t mean to scratch your back, but I personally enjoyed Bronx because I love to go to New York.

JC: Now, I know some of our readers will be furious if I don’t ask this: are there any other “war stories” that come to mind? Everyone seems to always love reading them. I know I’m guilty of that.

MD: I’m a bit hesitant here because I don’t want inadvertantly to offend anyone. If I’m going to offend someone, I would rather do it face to face. I guess I will take the risk. Maybe this story won’t offend.

When Jason Baldwin was a senior, a student showed up at a round robin with two judges, almost unheard of at the time. Those judges scouted the rounds, again something that usually did not happen at LD round robins. They listened to Jason three times in addition to judging assignments. When one of the kids said something to them, the response was, “Imagine that we should have good debate.” Well, it just happened that Jason debated this particualar student in the last round of the tournament. It also just happened that I judged her on the same side that she was supposed to debate Jason. It also just happened that Jason and I were both off the round before he was to debate her. Needless to say, we prepared. We even five-pointed her observation. We timed the response to every argument so that we knew which ones we needed to drop. Jason was very good at word economy, so we worked on saying arguments succinctly so that he could get in more arguments. When the debate was over and Jason had pretty much overwhelmed this debater, she made some comment to him about being prepped. His response was, “Imagine that we should have good debate.”

I guess we had rivalries with a large number of people. I hope that most of them were friendly, though I know that some of them were not. I guess one of my favorite people over the years was James Mallios from Bronx Science. He was just so funny. My kids loved him. He and Baldwin were great friends. James worked for me at institute and was assigned a lecture on fundamentals of Plato and Aristotle — a subject about which James was not particularly informed. James showed up for his lecture wrapped in a sheet like a toga with leaves wrapped around his head like a victory wreath. I’m afraid his lecture sounded strangely like Cliff’s Notes. On a personal level, I have brought my nieces to New York as their high school graduation present. Both times, I had lunch with [former Bronx Science coach] Robert Levinson, and once with James. I felt genuinely flatttered that James dragged himself out of bed after a looong night out just to meet with us.

During Hetal Doshi’s junior year, the National Earlybird at Wake Forest was a very important early-season tournament. I knew Hetal would be a good debater, but I thought we were a year away. When she was debating in the semis round, Robert Levinson called me into the stairwell and said, “okay, now I have figured out what you’re doing. You’re cheating and I know what you’re doing.” I was stunned! Certainly, I was accustomed to being accused of all kinds of things that I did not do, but I had always thought Robert was a very close friend. He kept talking: “I know now! You’re cloning the bitches!!” Needless to say, I was relieved to laugh that he was making a joke about a rather long string of excellent female debaters.

MD: You still teach at Vestavia, and you were present at Nationals to be inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame, yet you retired from coaching a number of years ago. Why?

MD: I assume you mean, “why did I retire?” The truth is the physical toll got to be huge and my health was suffering. I am not the type of person who can half do anything. When left with a choice between cutting back and getting out, I would rather get out. I loved debate, still do.

JC: Is it difficult to know that the debate program continues at the school without you? Have you ever been tempted to return, or help out more, or were you really serious about getting out as opposed to cutting back?

MD: I am delighted that the program continues. Needless to say, I would love to see some things done differently. However, different coaches are going to do things different ways. So that’s okay. Kids at Vestavia Hills are benefiting tremendously from the fact that Ben Osborne is continuing the debate program. Of course, I am sometimes tempted to help or suggest, but I don’t think that would be a good move. Ben does not need to be in my shadow, and he doesn’t need to appear to be leaning on me. He doesn’t need to do that. I have told Ben that I am available whenever he needs me, and sometimes he drops by — less now than he did the first couple of years. At first I listened to an occasional practice round, but now I don’t even do that. Was I serious about getting out? Absolutely. It is very important that kids in my school continue to benefit from forensics in all of its aspects. The program is better off if I am out of the picture.

JC: If you could give any bit of advice to a coach trying to start a new program, what would it be?

MD: This could be a book, and so much depends on the individual situation. I will a pick a couple of nuggets.

For most of us — perhaps not for those in very large cities — it is important to get as many people as possible involved in your program. We involved our administrators, our teachers, even our community. We asked teachers about ideas on topics relevant to their subject areas. We used to run ideas for Nationals by our principal because he was more like the judging pool there than anyone else we knew. The result, more than help with topics, was that they were all friendly when I took kids out of class because they saw first hand the educational value of the activity.. We involved our community in our program. We went to the Rotary Club and did programs and told them that we needed them, and we did. We got two important things from that: 1. They gave us upward of $15,000 a year, which made national travel possible; 2. When money was short in the school system, no one messed with debate; the community was committed to its value.

Also, involve a large number of students if at all possible. Have some who compete more locally and some who compete at the big National tournaments. Try to get the kids in the middle to one national tournament so that they can understand how wonderful is the experience that comes with a little more work.

I suppose, most important, is to keep yourself and your kids focused on the fact that this is education. There are no professional debaters, but there are huge numbers of people who benefit from the skills people learn in debate. Some of the students who benefited the most from my program were not necessarily my national winners; they were kids who learned self-confidence and critical thinking skills.

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