For the third straight year, Free State High School took home a trophy from the four-speaker debate state championship, adding to their status as one of the best speech and debate schools in the country.
The Firebird four-speaker debate team of Connor Brown, Sophie Racy, Gilly Falin, Cooper Hefty, Oliver Fredrick and Olive Minor finished with a 9-5 record and in third place Saturday.
“I’m proud of the work our students and coaches did throughout the season and tournament,” Free State debate coach Kelly Thompson said. “The debate season is long and exhausting, so any time you can bring home a state trophy to cap it off, it’s a success.”
The Kansas State High School Activities Association hosts two state tournaments for debate. The four-speaker tournament features eight schools that qualified from their respective regionals. Each school fields an affirmative and negative duo to debate in a round robin format for a total of 14 rounds per school. Schools can also bring two debaters as alternates.
Free State’s third-place finish followed up second-place finishes the last two seasons. It is the fourth straight year a school from Lawrence took home a top-three trophy. Lawrence High School won third place in 2021. Washburn Rural won its eighth straight 6A championship this year.
In the 6A two-speaker division, debaters from across the state compete against each other in a traditional debate tournament format. Duos debate six preliminary rounds, after which the top 32 pairings advance to a bracket.
This year, 62 debate pairings entered from 23 schools. The Free State duo of Nathan Peltier and Cooper Elo, both juniors, advanced to the 32-team bracket and won their first round before dropping in the round of 16 to Shawnee Mission South.
In the class 4A two-speaker tournament, Baldwin’s Olivia Hogelin and Parker Massey finished 4-2 in the preliminary debates. But because the 4A tournament only advances the top eight teams to the bracket, they barely missed out on a chance to compete for a state title, finishing in ninth on a tiebreaker.
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Cuyler Dunn (he/him), a contributor to The Lawrence Times since April 2022, is a student at the University of Kansas School of Journalism. He is a graduate of Lawrence High School where he was the editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper, The Budget, and was named the 2022 Kansas High School Journalist of the Year. Read his complete bio here. Read more of his work for the Times here.
Note: This post has been corrected from a previous version.
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Nathan Kramer / Lawrence Times
