When I moved to Houston, one of the first things I did was message debaters that I knew from here to understand how the Houston debate community operated. One of those debaters was my friend Layla Hooshmand, who gave me my first connections within the Houston circuit - including Dan Guinto, one of the first students I coached after graduating high school. I still remember well my first practices with Dan - he was (and is) a fast-talking flow debater with a sassy streak a mile wide, and an absolute joy to work with. We’d spend hours straight researching topics and doing start-stop drills, going over different ways to phrase arguments and different forms of vocal inflection.
Dan was also a challenge. We’d work on speeches together, day after day, and get them to where they needed to be, but every time he’d improvise or write something on the spot, it seemed that we hadn’t made progress. On script, his speeches were fine; off-script, they lacked the polish that national circuit competitors typically have.
Dan expressed to me early on that he wanted to try the national circuit, because he thought it would make him a better competitor. I agreed, and suggested he try Glenbrooks, but on a condition: he had to work twice as hard as normal, and put in 40+ hours of practice prior to the tournament. So, we set a schedule: every day he’d file evidence, deliver speeches, and adapt them using my feedback, until I thought he was ready. Little by little, he got better - but not good enough. Something just wasn’t clicking, and I didn’t understand why.
The night before Glenbrooks, Dan arrived at my dorm room at Rice ready for a full night of prep and practice before our early morning flight from Houston to Chicago, energetic as ever. (After a full week of exams, I sure wasn’t.)
Two hours in, though, it didn’t seem like we were getting anywhere. I tried to articulate how he could improve his rhetoric - introduce more personal narratives, develop cohesive themes, tell a story with intros - but nothing clicked.
Then, I had an idea.
Simon Sinek is a well-known speaker that I was first introduced to through the startup community, perhaps most famous for his 2011 TED Talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.” In the talk, he argues that the greatest businesses ‘start with why’: they don’t focus on what they do, but why they do it. From the talk:
“About three and a half years ago, I made a discovery. And this discovery profoundly changed my view on how I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it. As it turns out, there's a pattern. As it turns out, all the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act and communicate the exact same way. And it's the complete opposite to everyone else.
Let me give you an example. I use Apple because they're easy to understand and everybody gets it. If Apple were like everyone else, a marketing message from them might sound like this: "We make great computers. They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?" "Meh." That's how most of us communicate. That's how most marketing and sales are done, that's how we communicate interpersonally. We say what we do, we say how we're different or better and we expect some sort of a behavior, a purchase, a vote, something like that.
Here's how Apple actually communicates. "Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?" Totally different, right? You're ready to buy a computer from me. I just reversed the order of the information. What it proves to us is that people don't buy what you do; people buy why you do it.”
Eureka.
One 20-minute-long TED talk later, Dan was adapting his speeches to ‘start with why,’ treating each argument like a startup pitch. He was thinking about his audience and working backwards, instead of researching arguments and building his rhetoric on top. His speech quality doubled over the course of an hour. It worked.
Across this debate season, I’ve coached 29 students who’ve collectively accrued 90+ bids to the Tournament of Champions, and I’ve started each new student off by talking with them about the mindset of “starting with why”: building an in-round persona, and giving the audience an explanation of why you care about the argument you’re presenting. As I’ve grown as a coach, I’ve taken many of the skills I’ve learned from running startups and applied it to running arguments, and my students have changed the way they approach debate as a result.
I’m about to take another cue from the startup world and apply it to debate, in a way that’s both exciting and, frankly, terrifying. But first, I’ll take Simon’s advice - I’ll take a step back for a moment and try to explain the ‘why’.
At the conclusion of my debate career, a few students reached out to me about private coaching and debate camp choices. Based on the staff lists of the different options, I referred students to three major debate camps. Debate camp isn’t everything - anyone who expects to pay $2700 and magically “get good” is deluding themselves - but my camp experience after my sophomore year at FFI was transformative, and I know full well how being immersed in Congressional Debate for two weeks can lead to rapid growth as a debater. Given that I knew the instructors at each camp pretty well, I sent different students to each of the three, and I proceeded to check on them throughout, asking them for their comments on what they were getting.
What I heard back from them not only stunned me, but irritated me greatly. I heard that instructors were inaccessible, and some (not all) seemed disinterested in coaching. I heard that students in lower labs spent most of their time listening to instructors giving PowerPoint lectures on topics and strategies, rather than practicing them. I heard that the promises of a ‘low faculty-to-student ratio’ were, frankly, a sham - lab sizes were larger than promised, and some staff only provided help in short private lessons. At one camp, “breakout sessions” could be larger than 10 students per instructor, and at another, coaches appeared to be hungover on multiple occasions.
Did my students learn much of anything? Frankly, no - in many cases, I had to have my students “unlearn” things they’d learned at camp, and some of my students hated the experience so much they vowed not to return ever again.
The focus on efficiency and profit over student success in the debate camp world is an open secret. Curriculum development often comes secondary to recruiting, staff hires are often selected on tournament wins (not teaching ability), and the end result falls far short of what debate camp should do: open students’ eyes to new strategies for communication, and empower them to think critically about the issues they discuss.
As I thought about where to send my students this summer, I came to the realization that I couldn’t confidently recommend any existing camp to the kids I teach. There wasn’t a place that offered individualized attention and small seminars, that used innovative teaching methods like topic-based scenario rounds and flipped classrooms, that focused on growing students’ knowledge of the science of communication and not just giving them “shortcuts”, or that taught Congressional Debate as the unique, rewarding event that it is: a marriage between the best of flow debate and dramatic speech, a persuasion-first, audience-first debate form unlike any other.
In December, I met Terrence Lonam and Tom Evnen, the cofounders of the National Symposium for Debate, a debate camp that’s provided excellent LD and PF instruction for over a decade. In Terrence and Tom, I heard a story that resonated with me: they founded NSD, in their words, “because we were unhappy with what was out there, and thought we could build something more focused on the student.” Over the next few days, we hashed out a rough sketch of what a ‘better Congress camp’ might look like: rotating curriculum modules so instructors could adapt each day to what students need instead of scripting out camp two weeks in advance, rethinking topic lectures and turning them into scenario rounds, basing our teaching style on research into better teaching methods, and more.
Those conversations turned into an offer from NSD to become the Institute Director of a new Congress camp - an offer I accepted, and after weeks of work, I’m happy to announce that the inaugural session of NSD’s Congressional Debate Institute will launch this summer at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, PA, July 16-29.
More information will be forthcoming over the next few days and weeks, but I’m beyond excited to build this program up with a really exceptional team.
In the words of Ze Frank, from “An Invocation for Beginnings”:
“There is no need to sharpen my pencils anymore.
My pencils are sharp enough.
Warts and all.
Let’s start this sh*t up.

And god let me enjoy this. Life isn’t just a sequence of waiting for things to be done.”