Speech and debate has untold history
I was very pleased to read of the UCLA Speech and Debate team’s successes on Tuesday (“Speech and debate team gains steam,” News, May 27).
Speech and debate is an incredibly rewarding activity, and running a team without much funding or coaching isn’t easy. I commend the student leaders of the team ““ mostly.
I wish they hadn’t written me out of history.
The article reported that the team was robust and well-funded “over 10 years ago,” dismantled, and then formed as a real team again in 2005 out of two different “debate groups.”
Color me surprised; I was the captain of the UCLA Speech and Debate team from 2000-2002, and I’m pretty sure we had a real team then.
UCLA Speech and Debate has had funding and coaching struggles for more than a decade, to be sure, but while I was at UCLA we still managed to win boxes full of individual and team awards, travel to tournaments in Nebraska, Colorado and Oregon, and have debate partnerships ranked in the top 15 in the country in 2002 and 2003.
Just to make sure I didn’t invent this period in my life, I checked on the history, and indeed, the Daily Bruin ran an article about us in 2000 outlining our success at nationals and how we had to pay our own way.
I’ve since become a newspaper woman myself, and I learned that, in the world of student organizations, there’s often a backstory no one is old enough to remember.
The article also calls the UCLA team the “only student-run team on the West Coast,” which will probably be news to the long-running and incredibly successful team at UC Berkeley, which is student-run and self-funded.
Many congratulations and best wishes to the current team ““ but please don’t forget who came before you.
Andrea Saenz
Class of 2002
Editor in chief, Harvard Law Record