By Sam Doughton, Managing Editor
For senior James Llewellyn, dreams do come true.
Llewellyn will be attending the National Debate Tournament from June 15-20 in Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, after finishing in first place in the Lincoln-Douglas debate at the Carolina District West tournament in March.
Llewellyn finished on top of a total of 27 debaters in his division to qualify for the national tournament for the National Forensic League – also known as the NFL.
“(James qualifying) really felt like an accomplishment for the team, as well as a great accomplishment for James,” Speech and Debate coach Dean Rutledge said.
Llewellyn has been competing in debate since his freshman year at Reynolds and has been a very successful debater in his time, serving as team captain during his sophomore and senior year. He had to forego his junior year of debate when he was an exchange student in Malaysia.
“It was very gratifying,” Llewellyn said of his regional win, “after debating my freshman and sophomore year, then to come back from my exchange in Malaysia and qualify for the national tournament.”
To qualify for the national tournament, Llewellyn had to finish in one of the top two places in the Carolina District West tournament. The two-day event was double-elimination style; once a debater lost twice, he or she was eliminated. Llewellyn lost his first-round debate and then consecutively won five rounds to put him in the top three. Once he made the top three, he was awarded a bye in the final round and secured his spot in the National Tournament.
The Lincoln-Douglas debate, in Llewellyn’s own words, “Is a (debate) format in which single debaters debate against each other over the better part of an hour on philosophical issues.” Participants must prepare both an “affirmative” case that supports the resolution and a “negative” case that goes against. For the district tournament, Llewellyn debated “Resolved: Placing political conditions on humanitarian aid to foreign countries is just.”
The Reynolds debate team has had past success at the national tournament. A team of debaters from Reynolds finished in third place in Policy debate in 1971. Reynolds was once a powerhouse on the state debate circle, but the team eventually died completely until it was revived when Rutledge joined the Reynolds faculty in 2008.
The team is building a solid group of young debaters and speech participants to compete in tournaments across the state, but is often surpassed in both numbers and resources by larger, more established teams across the state that have dozens of debaters and speech participants compete.
“Because we’re new and often less experienced,” Rutledge said, “as a team we’re often underdogs. But in James, we have someone capable of doing as well as anyone at the national tournament.”
Llewellyn is happy to serve as an inspiration for future team members.
“The ability for Reynolds, with as small a program as we have, to put someone into the national tournament with these schools that have hundreds of debaters shows the ambitions of our program,” Llewellyn said.
Llewellyn will compete in the preliminary rounds of the national tournament on June 16-17, and depending on how the results fall in those rounds, will compete in either the consolation rounds or the final rounds from June 18-20.