TUESDAY — The third annual Shanghai American School Debate Open, or SASDO, is quickly approaching. SASDO promotes itself as a friendly inter-school parliamentary debate competition, hosted here at SAS Pudong, and jointly run by students from Pudong and Puxi.
Last year, SASDO, organized by now-graduated seniors Matt Song and Katie Chen, pulled in 6 schools, 60 debaters, 15 judges, and 25 volunteers. Few, if any, student-run competitions have achieved the same outreach.
Atlas Tan, a sophomore and president of Puxi’s debate club, said “we had massive shoes to fill from last year, as the event was such a massive success.”
Tan, new to running SASDO, also highlighted a number of issues the organizing committee faced. “Timing this year has been extremely tough, and we had quite short notice to when the event would be held, but in the end we recruited ferociously, and barely got more teams than last year.”
Until about a week ago, the organizers struggled with getting people to participate, especially for beginners intimidated by higher-level debaters. They became walking advertisements for SASDO, encouraging both debaters and judges to persuade as many of their friends as possible to join. While for weeks, the competition only had 12 teams, the recent recruiting spree pulled in a new wave of eager debaters.
This year, over 30 teams of all debate backgrounds will be attending the event on October 19th.
Indeed, SASDO will be introducing a number of complete strangers to structured debate. Cathy Shang, freshman, convinced eleven beginners to sign up, saying “most of them know each other, which means they’re less likely to feel huge pressure to win. I think this is just to introduce the majority of them to the wonderful world of debate.”
Trisha Mallempudi, freshman, said, “Debate was always the type of thing that I wanted to try but I never really got to. I think SASDO will give me a chance to get exposed to debate with others who are also inexperienced like me.”
While many beginners expect a low pressure, familiar environment to try out debate for the first time, sophomore Edward Huang recalls a different experience from last year’s event.
“Last year a lot of complete beginners went from my grade and let’s just say they had a bad experience. Mainly because most of the people there had prior debate experience and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re just setting yourself up for destruction.”
Still, he concedes, SASDO is still a better platform for beginners than larger tournaments, many of which allow university-level debaters as well.
Tan, as well, recognized how the competition left beginners discouraged last year.
This year, “we tried encouraging less experienced debaters to participate by pairing them up with stronger debaters, so that they could get specific feedback, as well as watching and learning from the best on how they do the basics.”
Debaters, judges, and organizers alike are all looking forward to a well-run, new event on Saturday.
*Eva Yuan is an experienced debater and will be debating at SASDO 2019.