J. Michael Rodriguez 17

Discussing the pros and cons of increasing U.S. security assistance to Southeast Asia is not an everyday topic for most students at SIUC.

But for SIUC’s nine-member Debate Team, that topic has brought them to a No. 1 ranking over nearly 200 universities in the nation.

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Greg Simerly, the team’s faculty director, said that being No. 1 is not an overnight task.

Hard work on the part of the debaters is why they are No. 1, Simerly said.

All debate teams in the Cross Examination Debate Association, which ranks the teams, vote on which topic they will debate on for the year. Simerly said SIUC voted for Southeast Asia because it is such a broad topic.

The Debate Team meets every day in Room 2005 in the Communications Building to practice speaking through speech drills and to do research on the topic.

The Saluki debaters are in their eighth weekend of competition. So far, they have a 26-point lead over second-place Emory University in Atlanta.

The No. 1 ranking is decided on a point system based on individual wins in a tournament. Each team receives points for each win, which are tallied at the beginning of each month when the rankings are made. SIUC, which also was ranked No. 1 in 1996, had 130 points as of Nov. 1.

The SIUC Debate Team’s season started in September and will last until the last weekend in March when the top two teams in the nation will compete in the National Championship Tournament in New York.

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Every weekend, two members from each university go head-to-head debating the pros and cons of Southeast Asia.

Wendy Woolery, a senior in political science from Chapel Hill, N.C., is in her sixth year as a debater on SIUC’s squad and said a big part in the team’s success is the way the member’s personalities interrelate with each other.

We all have personalities that jive well together, Woolery said. It’s essential for our team to get along with each other the way we do.

We have to keep working hard, and I believe we can do that because we have a really cohesive squad.

Southeast Asia is such a broad topic that there is always something new to debate about.

It’s a very interesting topic, Woolery said. It’s a very dynamic issue that keeps things fresh.

SIUC will debate the issue with such schools as Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of Illinois.

Dr. Carrie Crenshaw, first vice president for the Cross Examination Debate Association and debate coach at the University of Alabama, has seen SIUC debate and said the team is an impressive squad with a tough position to handle.

They make high-quality arguments with in-depth research and a good strategic sense of debating, Crenshaw said. It’s a tough competition. There are some really excellent teams out there, but a heart-felt commitment and dedication to success has kept teams No. 1 in the rankings.

Four of this year’s nine members were in junior varsity last year, but Simerly does not credit the team’s success to experience. What Simerly credit’s the No. 1 ranking to is hard work on the part of this year’s team.

Most of (the debaters) had experience debating in high school, Simerly said. But that’s only a small percentage of why we’re doing good. It’s more of what we are doing now.

The debaters will travel this weekend to Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., to face such schools as Southern California University and Emory University.