by Aaron Butts
For the past few decades, one of the dominating competitive teams at Capital doesn’t practice in the Cap Center, but rather in Huber-Spielman Hall. That team is none other than the Capital University Debate Team.
The Debate Team is headed by professor Steve Koch, a veteran debater and a long-serving faculty member at Capital. He has coached debate at Capital for 25 years and was led here after competing against Capital at other schools for nine years.
“I got recruited to take this position by the coach of the US Naval Academy’s team who, himself, was a former Capital debater,” Koch said.
Koch was adamant in addressing the similarities between debate and sport.
“Debate is like athletics, where in athletics you have different varieties of competition, so too in debate you have different varieties of debate competition,” Koch said.
The Capital Debate Team has a very long and proud tradition of winning throughout generations, and this year is no different. Already the team debating policy has won tournaments and placed ninth out of 45 teams at a regional debate tournament at West Point.
“We went to the east coast so that we could have a window on what competition looks like outside of the Midwest,” Koch said, regarding the debate at the military institute.
Although the team has already done some traveling, there is still much more in store. For the remainder of the semester there are a series of debate events taking place and the teams will travel to North Carolina, Iowa, and Pennsylvania for competitions.
According to Koch, more important to the students than the competition itself are the skills that one walks away with after competing in debate.
“The most important thing is something that students may not anticipate: it’s researching skill,” Koch said.
“You can’t go to competition without being a formidable researcher. You can sound as great as you want, but in these competitions, B.S. will not get you very far when the opposing team is calling you on it.”
This research ability translates not only into useful skills at Capital, but also on the graduate level.
“ Most debaters head on to graduate school,” Koch said. “I have had a lot of former debaters in law school who weren’t as overwhelmed as their classmates because of what they learned here.”
One of the debaters, Emily Gerken, would agree, but also points out that there are many other strengths that debaters develop.
“Networking, too,” Gerken said. “If you get really involved, you get a lot of contacts from different schools and in many different fields.”
Debate isn’t some causal pastime.
“I got into it because it was challenging and because it was something that allowed me to hang out with more intelligent people,” Gerken said, whose team has already won one tournament.
“This season we’re just warming up.” Debate is very demanding. Unlike other clubs that meet once a week or less, debate can sometimes be like a full-time job, requiring students to practice and research for many hours a week so they can have convincing arguments at tournaments.
Koch compared it to the Annual Undergraduate Symposium where Capital students share results from research projects that they’ve conducted that year, only the debaters have to present six symposium-like presentations at every tournament.
The competition for the debate team is broken up into three separate groups. The first is in a league which argues policy and politics. The second argues value issues which are more aimed at less concrete ideas making them very different from the arguments on policy, and the final topic is a league called “Lincoln-Douglas,” in which debaters argue one-on-one in competition.
Unlike some other schools which give out scholarships to successful high school debaters, Capital takes everyone whether they have prior debate experience or not. The team itself is diverse in its experience, as well as its areas of study.
“It’s all over the board,” Koch said. “You’d be surprised. We get folks from the hard sciences and the pre-professional programs, so not just communications or political science students.”
Koch could recall many former students who went into different fields afterwards.
“We’ve had two physicians, an M.D., a D.O., a biomedical research PhD, a communications PhD, anthropology PhD, and a pile of lawyers,” Koch said.
This year Capital has a very young team. “We’re really young,” Koch said. “Our most experienced group is our sophomores.”
He doesn’t view this as a challenge, but rather he looks forward to the future and a possible national victory when these younger members are juniors and seniors.
“We’re not an intimidating group right now,” Gerken said, “so it’s really easy to get involved.”
Currently there are roughly twelve members of the debate team, which is rather small for being involved in three different leagues of debate.
According to Gerken, some schools that she competes against have double that of Capital. But Koch seems to be worried about quality rather than quantity.
“Every year we get twenty or thirty students who want to get involved with debate, but they don’t know what they are getting themselves into,” Koch said. “It’s intense, but it is phenomenally useful.”
As the team and Coach Koch look forward to more success in November, as well as next semester, Koch also looks forward to the future of the program and what talent Capital still has to offer.
“If you’re interested in it, get involved,” Koch said. “The best thing that could possibly happen to you is to get involved with debate. You get so smart so fast.”
abutts@capital.edu
