Speech and Debate teams from around the Eastern Missouri region came together Nov. 18 to participate in the Ladue Novice Invitational.
Speech and Debate is an extracurricular where students are able to choose from a pool of debate events, where you can either go solo or have a partner, and a variety of speech events.
Many students from other schools were amazed by Ladue’s facilities and compared it with the other schools in the region.
“I definitely heard so many people just marvel at the wealth our school has, not even that but just the design, the architecture, the space [and] how big our school is,” Eric Fan (11) said. “We’ve been hearing some whispers like, ‘Dang, why can’t our school be like this?’”
Varsity and novice divisions are split across two schools, making it easier to manage the tournament.
“[LNI] is in collaboration with Clayton,” Fan said. They host the varsity division, we host the novice [division], and at the end, we all meet at Clayton to do awards.”
LNI was a unique experience, and many Ladue students who helped run the competition believe their time was spent well.
“LNI is a really, really fun experience,” Urmil Patel (10) said. “The opportunity to give novices and newer people in the debate community a chance to enjoy debate, being able to hang out with my friends [and] also being able to learn all these essential skills like multitasking and time management are things I think overall [made] LNI a really, really good experience for me specifically.”
