Why I’m Quitting Debate

The challenge of going against the grain in a sea of toxic success culture

Two days after my 15th birthday, I found myself rolling in the middle of Yalta Lane in Circle Pines, Minnesota. I had thrown a football back to a friend of mine in one of our many football games in the street, after the housing association had planted a tree in the patch of grass we used to play in because they didn’t like us playing there, and my kneecap ended up on the left side of my leg. I felt my whole body spin around and I landed on the asphalt, tearing up my hands. My knee was bent and I got scared. I didn’t know what was happening, I couldn’t straighten it. I forced it down with my hands and begged my friends to get my dad, because I didn’t have a cell phone yet. My knee gave, popped inside my leg this time, and my kneecap went back into place. I tried to stand as my dad rounded the corner, understandably concerned. I felt myself begin to cry as I couldn’t stand up by myself. I was already preparing for my sophomore season of football, I couldn’t afford a knee injury doing something I’d done a million times in my life.

Preparing for football was something that occupied a lot of time for me. I started playing football in 6th grade after years of wanting to play but not being able to afford to play. I still remember my dad standing with me in the street as a fourth grader, my dad the high school track sprinter, teaching me how to run and run fast, to push myself along the ground rather than out of it, my feet like oars in the water. And I was fast. Oh, was I fast. I spent the entire summer between my eighth grade and freshman years in a field a block away from my house sprinting, running cones, jumping rope, trying so hard to get faster and more athletic. I pushed myself from sun up to sun down because I was good at football, but I wanted to be great. I watched old videos of Walter Payton, and more recent videos of Adrian Peterson, Tiki Barber, and LaDanian Tomlinson while I iced my legs every night. From the moment I woke up, until the moment I went to sleep I was working on football. Holding a ball everywhere I went, never dropping it unless I had to set it down of my own accord. I lived for the game. But my freshman year ended with an injury and I never got to play under the lights despite having improved significantly that year at running back.

Yet here I was, just a kid crying for his dad in the middle of the street, praying to the deaf ears of a god who didn’t care that his knee was just going to be a little sore tomorrow morning.

I never played again. Sure, I longed for it. I missed the smell of the grass and the rain dripping off of my facemask as I look through before the play and see the eyes of every defender on me. I missed the sound of the pads popping and cracking. I missed my friends. I hated that I never got that feeling of running out onto the field on a crisp Friday night.

But I had to move on. I started coaching football my sophomore year, volunteering for the 8th-grade team. I loved it, it awakened a love for coaching in me. I knew then that I wanted to coach. But I had to continue on with my education. I started competing on the Speech team.

In Speech, I found something I didn’t have in football. I found something I had to work at to be good. I wasn’t good at Speech like I was naturally good at football. So I worked harder than I did for football. I wrote eight speeches a week for a year. I worked on my writing and memorization, I thought of new ideas and wrote things I was proud of for myself. I tried to move out of the box. I met new coaches, Keith Roberts and Tim Anderson, who would become huge parts of my life for the rest of my life. I did really well in Speech, and I did it for three years, and then I graduated.

Then, Tim and Keith called me and asked me to go coach with them. I didn’t hesitate. I joined my old coaches at Anoka High School coaching Speech. I’ve been doing that for 8 years. In a lot of ways, I feel really romantic about speech like I did about football. I love the soul of the activity. I love the buzz of the cafeteria as the students move to their rounds, the feeling of anticipation before finals are posted, and the joy on my kids’ faces as they see their name on the sheet for the first time. There’s nothing like that happiness, that pride, in seeing their work pay off for them. I think it feels better because it’s not for me. I don’t win anything, I don’t get a trophy. I don’t want any of that anymore, I just want it for them, and I want them to feel good about it and find their voices.

But then there’s awards. There’s something really beautiful about Speech awards in Minnesota. It’s hard to win here. We’re the most competitive circuit in the country and it’s not particularly close. More national champions have come from this state than any other. The National Speech and Debate Association’s Original Oratory national trophy is named for Joe and Pam Cady Wycoff, the coaches at Apple Valley High School. Pam judged my oratory at state in 2011. It’s mythically difficult to win in Minnesota. So to see my kids win trophies is a huge source of pride and motivation for both of us.

At Anoka, we built a program. We haven’t reached where we want yet, but we’re working. It’s getting bigger and it’s getting better. It just takes time, effort, and attention.

Four years ago, I had five students approach me and ask me to take the job of head coach of the Debate team at Anoka. I was apprehensive, I’d never even seen a debate round. I thought about it a lot, I talked to Tim, and I talked to my wife and we decided that it would help the Speech program for me to take the job. I thought that debate was a really important skill and that we could take the same approach as Speech and focus on learning that skill and positivity, and that wins would follow. I was confident in my ability as a coach to get it done. Tim joined me as my assistant, and we merged the two programs.

What has happened over the course of my tenure has been frustrating, confusing, and at times embarrassing. Not for our program, not for my students, but for the activity of Debate.

Over four years, I have struggled with why I never connected with Debate in the same way that I connected with Speech. Tournaments were similar, but felt slightly off. Many of the same competitors in Speech also competed in Debate. There were awards, but it never hit me the same way that Speech did. Coming into this year, I think it finally hit me: Debate lacks a soul.

For many of my colleagues, this activity is an opportunity to push students to be more. However, for too many, this activity has an obsessive, toxic, and singular focus on winning. In Debate, the culture is similar to Speech, but instead of focusing on learning and growing, we focus on wins and losses. We sacrifice ethical and moral standing for wins. The hubris of coaches, like myself, is to accumulate wins and losses and trophies and NSDA points. For too long, kids have been taught what wins instead of what makes good debate. They’re taught to “spread,” which is a shorthand way of saying “speed read” their cases to fit in as much as possible into their argument, rather than creating actually carefully crafted arguments. Kids are taught to attack personal ideas rather than debate the topic. In one instance, a student deviated from the topic in a round to instead dive into a completely unrelated debate about pronouns and trigger warnings. They won, rewarding them not for debating what was prepared, but instead doing whatever it took to win. Now, I should say here that I don’t have any issue with pronouns or trigger warnings. They’re necessary and we should have more conversations about them to educate people who disagree. But that’s not what debate is about, it’s not about changing the conversation so that we can discuss something unrelated and beat someone with our own topic. That creates cynicism about conversations surrounding equity and justice because those who need to hear those conversations will only have experienced them in this sort of conceited, and self-serving way. It’s a disservice to those who rely on those conversations for educating others and eliminating ignorance and promoting equity, and it’s wrong to weaponize identity just to win. It’s isolating for those in many communities underrepresented in Debate and beyond to be treated like a tool on the way to a win. But it’s par for the course in this community.

That’s the thing about Minnesota’s Debate community. Equity, around here, is a vanity project. It’s another hubris-driven angle by coaches to try and appear as though they’re creating and promoting a fair and equal environment rather than actually promoting it. If you look around the community, it’s absolutely a racially and ethnically diverse coalition of students and coaches. But, socioeconomically, there isn’t a whole lot of opportunities for winning if you’re from a smaller, poorer, school or area. As a coach in a program that doesn’t get district support in the way many of the Southern city programs do, success has been hard to come by. We don’t have the resources, our kids are often from poorer families and less able to come to practice reliably or to tournaments reliably. The tournaments we can go to are all hosted by and paid to rich programs who never spread that wealth back to Northside programs that desperately need it. These schools, like Apple Valley, Eagan, East Ridge, Eden Prairie, Lakeville, Minnetonka, and the private schools like Saint Paul Academy, Blake, and Mounds Park Academy, all seem to be more interested in the furthering of their community cultures of toxicity and their overwhelming desires to do absolutely anything to win. All the while, schools like Anoka struggle to get kids to stay in their programs. Students tell me they’re quitting because they don’t want to be around it anymore. They don’t like competing in debate, though they’ll continue to compete in Speech. They call it toxic.

Because here’s the problem: when you’re so focused on winning, you lose things that otherwise would not be forgotten. Things like teaching your students to respect others. Things like teaching those same students to respect the art of debate, and not simply working to get an edge. Things like forming relationships with students beyond winning, and instilling in them a desire to build themselves up by building others up, rather than simply laying waste to all who stand before them. This activity, this community, is missing its soul. We don’t have anything other than winning and losing, and for so many of these kids, that’s not enough. For too many coaches, that’s not enough. This community has a habit of seeking validation in success only to find that it’s not enough, and we become gluttonous for success. We lose sight of what’s important, and winning just isn’t fulfilling. So we get angry, and we demand more, we chase the victories and that fleeting feeling of accomplishment. Instead of focusing on growth, and celebrating growth as success, the debate community chases the material successes and the accolades that when these students graduate will mean little more than the failure to get the validation that they were told it would bring. We’re perpetuating a culture that says “more” is equal to “success,” rather than success being defined by our own terms, in our own ways.

How many of our students are broken by this line of thinking? How many are stuck trying to quantify their success with awards and accolades, when their real success is the growth and the friends they made by stepping out of their comfort zone? How much more success have we denied by only focusing on winning?

What’s worse is that it permeates deeply because it’s addictive. Kids love to win, but they love to be appreciated more. They want to feel validated. These young humans, these amazing and brilliant people who get told what to do every minute of every day and just for a moment want to feel that affection and respect that comes from being recognized for their hard work and dedication, will do absolutely anything to catch your eye. They just want to know you care. They want to feel that you respect them, their work and their effort. Challenge them to grow, sure, but never ever lose sight that our job as coaches is to get these fantastic, curious people to see what they can be and to get them to reach for it with everything they have. That’s coaching. That’s education. When these kids see that all you care about is winning, they’ll mirror that. Not because they’re simple or because they’re incapable of seeing anything else, but because they don’t know what they’re doing yet and they’re seeking answers. Everyone comes to our classroom, our activity, seeking answers about the world and about themselves. It’s our job to teach them how to find answers within themselves, not to teach them how to get trophies. That’s the job. If you’re here for any other reason, you’re here for the wrong reason. Coaching has never been about us. It’s about them, for them. These kids you think about every morning when you wake up and every night before you go to sleep. The ones you worry about when their friends talk about how they’re struggling. The ones who worry about you when they see you burning the candle at both ends for them. It’s not because they’re friends. It’s not like that. It’s because they trusted you to teach them to the absolute best of your ability and to extract from them things that they once only wished would be there. They trust us to show them that in the darkest moments, in the moments when they feel that they’ll never get there, when the losses mount and it feels like the work has been for naught, that they’ll never for a moment be alone in that feeling. And every day, every year, this community betrays that trust by abandoning these kids to that darkness because they don’t win enough. Because they’re not good enough.

So you may ask yourself why I would be leaving if I feel this strongly about debate and this community, why I’m not staying to fix it.

Well, in short, it’s because of Ted Lasso.

I didn’t watch season 1 of the show until this year. But it reminded me why I got into coaching, and why I love doing this job. It reminded me what the job was: to make people feel like they belong and to help them become better people in the process, and to do it with a kind smile and the love of learning you hope they find in themselves.

Then, I began to really examine what we were doing at Anoka.

We took a deeply toxic and problematic Anoka program and transformed it into a tightly-knit, constructive space for students to explore their own beliefs and challenge each other in a healthy way. By focusing on the skill and the mental health of our students rather than winning, we created a culture and environment where students can be open with themselves and others about where they’re at and how we can help. All the while, we continue to prepare for the inevitability that we will lose because we don’t do things the way that wins, but we do it the right way. And in that, even when we lose every week, we will never fail. Because never, ever, ever will our students feel that they’re alone or that they’re not good enough. They know success because they know what it’s like to lose and to continue anyway within a community of people who are all doing the right thing and losing. I did what I could. I’m deeply proud of that, and proud of every student in this program.

But there are failures in this for me, personally. Despite outreach and effort, I wasn’t able to make our debate team as diverse as I’d wanted. While I consider our huge LGBTQ representation a major win, I’d wanted to create a space where more students of color could also feel community on our team, and that never materialized. That’s on me, and in leaving, it is a failure of mine and mine alone. I own that.

But more than that, my greatest failure is that I allowed myself to be a part of the toxic culture of winning by giving in. At the beginning of this year, I told my students I wanted to focus more on competitive success. At multiple points, I felt myself become disappointed that we weren’t more successful. I even allowed myself to try and “find an edge,” a habit that I hate more than any in this community. Despite my best efforts, that toxicity is finding more of a foothold in me. I can’t deny that I have fought with this for my entire tenure, but it’s not the coach I want to be and it’s not the coach that these amazing students deserve.

So I’m leaving debate. I’m still coaching speech, but I’m leaving debate. I want to see the program succeed, and I want success for these kids more than I need to breathe. But it’s time for me to step away.

If all goes to plan, I’ll be returning to my first love: football. I understand that football isn’t without its own problems or toxicity, but once again and wherever I end up, I’ll be focusing on the kids. I’ll be trying to make better people in a community and team that focuses on growth and relationships before winning and statistics. And if everything goes how I hope it will, I’ll be finally running out of that tunnel. Under the lights, on Friday night, with the band playing and the crowd cheering.

Only this time, it won’t be for me. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.