2017 Apple Valley Finalist Interviews
Note: if you have questions you’d like us to ask, you can submit them here, and we’ll ask them during the next set of tourney interviews! Greenhill SK and her coaches were unavailable for interviews.
Finalist Interview
Brianna Aaron (Newark Science BA) was Top Speaker and 6-0 in Prelims en route to finals of the Apple Valley Debate Tournament. Premier Debate has an exclusive interview with Brianna!
Brianna Aaron (Newark Science BA), Finalist
Question: At Apple Valley, you were 6-0 in prelims, top speaker, and top seed. Clearly you had control; what do you attribute your tremendous success to on the first tournament of the topic?
Brianna Aaron: Well, I was in a funk for the first two months of the year (due to college apps, debate, life, etc.) and I wanted to find a way to regain control of everything. I was extremely motivated to do well at this tournament in order to have a nice “bounce back” to begin the new topic. My coaches and friends in the debate community also motivated me to try my very best too.
Q: You not only bounced back, you demonstrated mastery of the topic lit. What did prep look like leading into the tournament?
BA: Funnily enough, I ended up making my aff the day before the tournament started. My coach has a tendency of booking flights very early so we arrived on the Thursday right before Apple Valley began and I just took a few hours to make my Aff. Even before then, though, my mind was thinking about the topic and my first instinct when I heard about wealthy nations providing development assistance was “reparations”. Instincts led me to constructing that aff for the tournament. In terms of the Negative prep work, I was more so reliant on the generics that I had just because I wasn’t quite sure what Affs people would be running since the topic was so new. Most of my prep consisted of bettering my analysis when it came to presenting and answering arguments and just making the necessary front-lines to arguments I knew I’d hit.
Q: Did any of the positions you saw take you by surprise? If so, how’d you adapt?
BA: I was probably just hit with positions I was unfamiliar with or hadn’t seen in some time. So, in one round, a girl read a Fem IR framework aff that I had to beat back. Then, in another particular round, someone had broken a new aff on debt forgiveness. Now, the latter I was more unused to so, even though I used my generics, I was heavily reliant on any case analytics I could conjure up while time pressed.
Q: With heavy reliance on case analytics, you likely have a firm grasp of argument generation. How does one improve at argument generation? Any drills?
BA: I think it’s a combination of practice makes perfect and drilling to be quite honest. Familiarizing yourself with arguments is the way to go. For example, for me, there’s just some arguments I know that I have to intuitively make when it comes to answering some arguments so I exhibit a sort of robotic like response when answering them. I also really enjoy making 1AR frontlines so, while I’m making those frontlines, I just start to memorize the arguments I want to utilize in rounds. The drills didn’t really occur at this tournament in particular (other than the practice rounds my coach made me have with my teammate) but they were a mix of previous drills I’ve had to do. Some examples of useful drills I’ve done were Hell 1AR drills (with little prep time) or just redoing past rebuttals.
Q: Alright, I can’t help but ask. You said you wrote your aff the day before the tournament, and enjoy writing 1AR frontlines, and you also were aff every round of elims. How does one write such an incredible case in one day?
BA: So, even though I had to write my aff, I sort of knew what the “story” of my aff would look like. That may sound weird but my team has a tendency on making their aff have a nice story to it so I just followed that pattern. I knew I wanted to talk about disenfranchised communities and reparations. In order to do that, I started drawing patterns with things I like to talk about (in this case, the societal problems plaguing black people) or major issues in the real world (like poverty and environmental issues). It’s all about just seeing what you like and making a story out of it.
Q: Speaking of such issues, are there any concerns you have within the debate community you feel particularly passionate about?
BA: I think that’s it’s pretty obvious by now that I, along with a multitude of Newark Science students and coaches, like to talk about racism and problems that plague people because of it. So, yes, I do think racial issues are a problem that needs to be addressed both in the debate community and in the world around us. This will probably be a long and grueling process but there’s certain steps that can be made to do so. Also (maybe it’s because I’m a senior now and I’m almost transitioning into the “real world”), but I’ve noticed how extremely stressed out and tired people are especially those around me and how it affects their psyche. I’m an advocate for preventing and talking about mental illness so I just want people to breathe sometimes, talk to whoever is needed to speak to, and/or find some other way of getting the help required.
BA: In terms of shout outs, I’d definitely have to thank Apple Valley for hosting such a nice tournament. Everything was timely and fun and, even though my school’s gone there for the first time in about 10 years or so, I can definitely say that we’d be going back there again. I’d also like to thank my coaches Jonathon Alston, Sunhee Simon, Christian Quiroz, and Heaven Montague for all of their work that they’ve put into me.
Thanks so much to Brianna for sharing her perspective with the community! If you appreciate these interviews, please leave us some feedback (either in this survey or in the comments below).
