In a real throwback to the last two seasons, Barstow’s varsity and novice debaters competed in an online tournament. While tournaments this season have returned to in-person, the start of online tournaments allowed schools to compete more, and against varying teams.
The tournament started on Friday, December 2, and held two preliminary rounds then and the other four on Saturday. On those two days, the six Barstow teams competed from school, but on Sunday, during elimination rounds, they debated from home.
Barstow had two novice teams competing at the tournament, and both performed exceptionally. Freshmen Rohan Thomas and Eshan Patel went 5-1 in preliminary rounds, and Darin Goodman and Elliott Osman went 6-0 in preliminaries.
Both teams advanced to the semi-finals round, where they were unfortunately matched against each other. Since they can’t debate each other, the team with the better record (Goodman and Osman) walked over Thomas and Patel, and went on to compete in the finals round against a team from the Asian Debate League.
“The whole tournament, especially finals, was stressful,” Osman explains, but overall both of them enjoyed it, and Goodman says, “It was a pretty close round. We gained a lot of knowledge but had a lot of fun.”
Osman and Goodman ended up winning the finals round on a 3-0 vote, taking 1st for the whole tournament. “One judge left for wifi issues at the end so we went on to the online site, tabroom, and saw three wins,” Osman explains.
In the Varsity division, the top Barstow team was Ava Levin (‘24) and Tyler Bauman (‘25), who went 4-2 in prelims, very narrowly missing the top 16, who would advance to elimination rounds. The rest of the teams enjoyed the tournament, with Mahek Vora (‘25) and Paranjay Sharma (‘24) going 3-3, and both Jayden Sampat (‘24) and Haddie Schedler (‘25), and Rish Sood (‘25) and Aaryan Gadit (‘25) going 2-4.
“Initially, the tournament wasn’t going very well,” according to Bauman. “We lost to some pretty interesting teams in the first two rounds, but we were able to win all four the next day and climb back up to 17th place.”
Overall, all the teams enjoyed the tournament and even though it was online, they learned from it and are ready for their next tournament, which coincidentally is also online, at the beginning of January.
