On the 25th of January, our Year 9 St Cenydd Debate team visited John Frost School to compete in the regional EAS debate final. After a few weeks of practice, we felt very nervous about the competition and didn’t really know what to expect.
After we arrived, we were taken to the school library and met with Karen, who was coordinating the competition. She explained the rules and gave us our motion to debate: ‘sports clubs should be made liable for the behaviour of their fans’. We were given the role of the opposition which meant that we had to disagree with the motion set.
As we had never debated this topic before, we were given 45 minutes to prepare notes to help us in the debate. We used that time to research, find facts and statistics and plan our speech. Quite a bit of that time was also spent pacing to calm our nerves! It was important that we worked as a team so we had to communicate and support each other with our speeches. The 45 minutes felt like it was over in a flash and it was then time to debate!
The debate was intense and nerve-wracking but it was also exciting and really fun to try something new. It was really good to listen to the other team and hear their points of view. The judges were really impressed with our skills and delivery, especially as this was our first competition. Unfortunately, we missed out on the national final by 6 points but we scored over 100 points in total and are really proud of our achievement!
We can’t wait for our next debate!
Caitlin, Rosie, Tegan, Lucas & Seren (Year 9 debate team)