On Saturday, March 20, the Independence High School debate team participated in the end-of-year Virginia High School League (VHSL) Debate Regional tournament, where they placed for many categories and were crowned the Regional Champions. There, several debaters competed in the categories of Public Forums, Policy, Lincoln-Douglas and Congress. These debaters included:

• Hriday Unadkat, junior & Darsh Ravada, junior – Public Forum First Place
• Rahul Kumar, senior & Pranav Nair, freshman – Public Forum Third Place
• Charles Anderson, junior & Roshan Arokiaraj, junior – Policy First Place
• Riya Chamala, sophomore & Catherine Joseph, freshman – Policy Third Place
• Angad Aggarwal, senior – Lincoln-Douglas Fourth Place
• Lahari Kunapaneni, sophomore – Lincoln-Douglas Fifth Place
• Hamsini Sivalenka, senior – Lincoln-Douglas
• Satvik Ratnala, freshman – Congress 12th Place

The competition was the first time the Independence debate team debated at an end-of-year finals tournament virtually. Hriday Unadkat explained that “the online debate environment was challenging earlier on in the year, [but] our team slowly but surely became adept at articulating arguments in the environment.”

The debate competitions functioned entirely in a virtual environment. Unadkat stated that there are a series of rounds that take place from 2-6 pm over a span of two days. There, the debaters have a set of procedures that are based off of the type of competition they are participating in. Once the round is over, and the debaters have presented to their judges, those judges in turn decide who won the round, most speaker points — based on eloquence and soundness of argument — along with several other factors.

Based on how well the whole debate team performed overall, they can place based off of combined points. For the Independence debate team, this is how they earned the first place spot at the VHSL regional tournament.