When I first started debate, I absolutely loathed it. My elementary and middle schools didn’t host teams, so my mother put me in the debate class of SpiderSmart Learning Center, an after-school program where I’d done reading/writing tutoring for three years and public speaking classes for a year prior. Public speaking, consisting of prose and lip-syncing performances, had been difficult enough that I had to step out of my comfort zone but low-maintenance enough that I only thought about it during the weekly one-and-a-half-hour classes. Tournaments then were so insignificant that the only moment I can recall is dramatically shedding my jacket during my lip-sync performance of Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me.”
I expected debate to be the same thing, just for older kids—I was in middle school now, which meant all my extracurriculars should logically mature along with me. And so it did; Taylor Swift and prose about moonlit villages turned into discussions about economics and foreign affairs and everything I didn’t care about. When the SpiderSmart coach, a late-middle-aged man who also coached a high school debate team, first shared a “case” with us, a rambunctious group of eleven-year-olds, we immediately started tampering with the Google Doc, erasing lines and typing potty jokes in the margins. Needless to say, that coach didn’t come back.
SpiderSmart seemed to learn its lesson after one more adult coach and hired a high school debater next. Her name was Mabel, she wore crop tops and ripped jeans and makeup, and I thought she was the coolest person ever. Perhaps that’s why I genuinely paid attention to her lectures about the United Nations Convention Law of the Sea even though it fit directly into my category of Things I Didn’t Give Two Shits About and definitely why I still remember how she told the team about how she’d been voted down before because her skirt was too short or she was too “aggressive” during rounds. From the start, she taught me to assert my voice loudly into the round, to continue to be passionate even when I was put down for it. Women in debate and most other events involving speech and presentation have it hard, and I wouldn’t realize the extent of it until much later.
Unfortunately, Mabel left SpiderSmart after only a few weeks and was replaced by Wallace, another high school debater. Objectively, he competitively outshone Mabel, and he was a better coach in that he knew how to maintain the attention of a horde of pre-teens. When he taught us what affirming and negating meant and the structures of each argument, he used the topic “Resolved: Wallace is gay” as an example, which was the funniest knee-slapper we had ever witnessed. He felt more like a friend than an authority figure, and we would often make fun of him for chewing on his hoodie strings while he was prepping. It was under his tutelage that I won my very first debate tournament in the novice division at a local high school as a beaming twelve-year-old, and it’s during this time when I think I started taking debate seriously.
It was also during this time when Fort Settlement, my middle school, started a debate team coached by high school volunteers. Public forum (PF), the debate event I did, was of course my first choice when applying for the team, but because I also did a year of speech, I put poetry/prose as my second option. I ended up being sorted into poetry/prose, which was taught by Niousha, whose main event was also PF. Speech was much more relaxed than debate; our room was a random supply closet, and all we did was find pieces or book excerpts that we wanted to put together into a cohesive program. I was never invested in speech—it was more theater than anything, and I was too shy to even make facial expressions then—so it never meant much to me, but like Mabel, Niousha was the coolest person in the world. Our first practice was the day of the homecoming game, and when she came with short shorts and painted legs, I clung onto every word she spoke.
Of course, just when my momentum in debate had just started to build, the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the middle of my seventh grade year. Fortunately, debate adapted quickly; the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA) launched Tabroom, an online portal for everything tournament-related, and the new coach for SpiderSmart, Bryan, created a Discord server for the team as student-organized Discord tournaments were starting to appear. Ironically, the debate community grew closer than ever. Bryan was just as funny if not funnier than Wallace, and because school was suspended, we had nothing else to do except spend hours on debate. The SpiderSmart Discord server was literally always active, and we became a friend group that would call, gossip, and pin the egregious statements we as middle schoolers weren’t afraid to leave in our digital footprint.
In June following my seventh grade year, several allegations of sexual assault, sexism, and racism came out against Wallace. One came specifically from a girl in debate: she said that she had been friends with benefits with Wallace, and during a tournament, they snuck into a restroom to make out. However, Wallace had forced her hand onto his dick, which she felt uncomfortable with, but he wouldn’t let her go. She allegedly escaped his grasp and bolted as fast as she could.
Naturally, at first, twelve-year-old me didn’t believe her or the other girls who spoke out. It’s difficult for a kid to wrap her mind around the idea that her coach, her debate idol, could have done things so objectively bad. I even reached out to him to claim that I was on his side after he defensively told me that the allegations weren’t true.
The pandemic expedited my maturity, though, and through the explosion of social media and movements, I realized that Wallace was indeed in the wrong. It was further confirmed when Bryan told the team that he had expected Wallace’s downfall—at camp, Wallace, as a rising senior, would bring rising freshman girls into his dorm alone, presumably for sex. The borderline predatory behavior shocked and disgusted me as someone who at the time was only a year younger than those girls. When I was ending eighth grade, still online, Bryan updated the team on Wallace’s situation: his acceptance to Dartmouth had been rescinded, and he spent a gap year in Taiwan before coming back to attend UT-Austin and change his name to Victor.
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