Binghamton debate team takes the trophy at national tournament

For only the second time, a team in New York state has won the Cross-Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Nationals.

“This is a huge win for our debate team as a whole,” said Joe Schatz, the director of Binghamton University’s speech and debate program. “It shows off the strength of our current program and works as a strong incentive for future high school debaters to come here, ensuring the strength of our program into the future.”

Binghamton University’s varsity team — led to victory in the tournament by senior Eli Louis-Turner, who ranked as the second-best speaker in the country, and junior Akif Choudhury, ranked 19^th — has had a productive year.

In the 2024 ongoing Binghamton University season, Schatz’s team has won the West Point tournament for the second year in a row and has qualified out of district for the National Debate Tournament as the top seed, without dropping a single ballot in the qualifying tournament. The team competed again for the National Debate Tournament from April 5-8, and managed to make it to the sweet-sixteen round — only the second time to do so in their history.

Louis-Turner said that the team, as well as her own skills, have improved tremendously this year, though not without hard work.

“I had the passion, but not the packaging. So, more and more as time went by, I matured and figured out how to be more precise, while being true to myself,” Louis-Turner said.

CEDA Nationals takes place in a bracket style. To get to the last round, the Binghamton debate team defeated several national teams, including Harvard. By competing in teams of two over four days, in nearly 15 matches total, the Binghamton debate team slowly inched its way higher into the rankings.

Other members of the team, such as Jeremy Santora and Jeremiah Cohn, qualified for elimination rounds and made it to the double octo-finals (round 32). Kate Marin and Sonnie Picallo — both graduating seniors who ranked as the eighth- and ninth-best speakers at the tournament, respectively — made it to the “elite eight,” or quarterfinals, where Louis-Turner and Choudhury then advanced as the higher-ranked pair.

There, Louis-Turner and Choudhury guessed correctly on a coin toss and decided to argue for the “pro” side of the debate topic — restricting the United States’ nuclear forces. The call was the right one. Even facing off against Wake Forest University, where the winners of last year’s tournament hail from, couldn’t stop them. They won on a 5-2 decision.

This is Louis-Turner’s second year in the top four at CEDA Nationals. Last year, along with Picallo, she made it to the quarterfinal round. She thanked her community for preparing her for the debate.

“This win means a lot. A lot of work, sacrifices and love has been put into it,” Louis-Turner said. “The names are intensive, but being able to have people to call very late — up to 2-3 a.m. — was key to how I processed my ideas, thoughts and feelings. Those people nursed me when I could no longer lick my own wounds.”

Choudhury, too, thanks the community, including several former and current teammates, who helped influence his debate style.

“They reframed what I understood debate to be and allowed me to articulate myself better through practice and experience,” he said. “The win showed that we can persist through the structural inequities in debate while maintaining a strong national ranking.”

Although the team continues to display strengths and innovation, Binghamton debate is a bit of an underdog success story. Team leaders cite administrative and alumni support as the lynchpin to success.

“We regularly compete against schools that have more money to draw upon — Cornell, University of Rochester, NYU — that also have scholarship money or larger coaching staff than we’re able to have. We’re oftentimes operating at a resource deficit,” Schatz said. “Having administrative support has been crucial: they’ve increasingly wanted to try and find ways to get the campus more engaged and build facilities that the students want to be a part of.”

For example, When Schatz was a student at Binghamton and part of the team himself, speech and debate was a student-run organization with $2,000 to split between themselves. Now, Schatz has members on his team who apply to Binghamton purely for the program — from countries as far as Japan — who have been perfecting their abilities since they were young, and the administration has set aside funds for the director position and a consistent travel budget.

The team is active in the civic and social spheres as well: curriculum programs at East and West Middle Schools teach middle-schoolers debate skills — which, for the second year in a row, they later bring to Harvard’s high school tournament — and the team helped organize Common Read programming, public debates and civil dialog sessions on campus by partnering with the Center for Civic Engagement (CCE), the Multicultural Resource Center (MRC) and the Office of the Dean of Students.

Meanwhile, by fielding teams in novice and JV tournaments on a regional scale, which many other schools do not offer, Binghamton makes debate accessible to another set of students.

This presence on this circuit, along with the annual Phyllis Schatz Invitational — named after Joe Schatz’s mother, who has hand-quilted a full-size quilt as the tournament’s award for the last 20 years in a row — also brings a few hundred people to campus each year and draws interest in Binghamton as a graduate institution.

“She has been quilting awards for the tournament since I took control in 2000-2001,” Schatz said. “Each square has the winners of the varsity division for each year. West Point has a sword that goes around. Binghamton has a traveling quilt.”

From the Schatzs to the hundreds of others who have supported from near and far, the success at CEDA Nationals only cements the program as a national competitor and serves as a reminder that Binghamton works best as a team.

“We couldn’t have won this championship without the decades of alumni support and involvement in the past. They helped lay the groundwork,” Schatz said. “I can’t wait to see what the legacy of this victory will leave on this program and the success we’ll be able to achieve.”