Sometimes the best place to look for inspiration is close to home. And sometimes, those close to you can make a national splash delivering the goods. At a messy, frustrating moment in America’s political discourse, Orange Coast College’s speech and debate team has earned a first-place countrywide finish — for the third consecutive year. In 40 years, no other team has pulled off a threepeat.
Milestones like these often come complete with remarkable details, and, here, OCC plays to tradition. Defeating the next-place finisher by a 116-point margin — one of the all-time widest — OCC surpassed 300 points in total, setting a new historic benchmark in the competition. Team members achieved remarkable personal distinctions too. First-year competitor Krista Apardian won four gold medals and the tournament’s Top Speaker award, while second-year competitor Erin Roberts took home three golds, a silver and the second-place individual prize overall.
“Our goal as educators is to create critical thinkers,” Shauhin Davari, director of individual events at Orange Coast College, told us. “We try to do that through competition, putting our students against the best and brightest. And over the past three years our students have showed a commitment that is unparalleled in OCC history.”
All too often, today’s outrage-a-minute culture cultivates a distorted sense of debate. Rather than a spirited and civilized contest between teams that understand the art of argument and the value of reasoned rhetoric, public discussion is dominated by weaponized performance art — more focused around grabbing attention by triggering enemies than winning converts through the power of persuasion. Now is the perfect time for a clear reminder that sophisticated debates aren’t just for college, or for a narrow slice of some national elite.
So in addition to appreciating OCC’s outsized example in our corner of the country, Southern Californians ought to reflect on the good news about our civic future that poorly-argued acrimony can obscure. No one debate can change the culture — perhaps especially on social media. But among today’s rising generations, no matter how challenging the campus climate, the calling to surmount our current impasses is still alive and well. Whichever of our partisan teams flexes power over the years to come, we’ll all benefit from the spirit OCC Speech and Debate put so impressively on display.