Kudos Youth Leadership Sweeps the Frist SCJFL Debate Tournament!

On October 5th, the Kudos Middle School Tournament Team kicked off the 2024-2025 school year by participating in their first tournament at the Southern California Junior Forensics League (SCJFL). This tournament was especially significant as it featured many first-time competitors from Kudos, all of whom gained valuable experience and performed exceptionally well in their debut.
Across all debate events, Kudos achieved numerous trophies and impressive results. This strong performance marks a promising start to what is sure to be an exciting and successful tournament season ahead. Well done to all the competitors!

On May 3-4, 2024, the Kudos tournament team participated in the Middle School Tournament of Champions (TOC), a national competition held online this year. We are excited to announce our team’s impressive achievements.

In the Lincoln-Douglas debate, Katherine Duan advanced to the octofinals, showcasing her strong debating skills.

In the Congress debate, our team members excelled: Hayley Fung won first place, Zoey Luc earned third place, Sanju (Sanjana) Chanumalla achieved seventh place, Carrie Rao secured ninth place, and John Dong reached the semifinals.

We congratulate our talented students and dedicated coaches for their outstanding accomplishments and hard work.

On April 5th, the Kudos speech team shone at the 4th Quarter SCJFL Speech Tournament, held virtually. They made it to the finals in every event they entered, showcasing their talent and dedication. Bailey Tang clinched 1st in Open Spar, with Alyssa Guo scoring 3rd. Kaylee Lu landed 6th, Harry Zhou 7th, and Jason Xu 11th, all contributing to the team’s success.

Alyssa Guo also grabbed 2nd in Informative, while Kaylee Lu impressed with 5th in Impromptu and Jenay Han took 3rd in Informative. Congratulations to the Kudos team for their exceptional performance!

Hello Kudos Family! We are happy to share our results from our final tournament of the year, the Middle School Tournament of Champions held in Lexington, Kentucky.

Over the weekend of April 29th & 30th, Kudos traveled across the country to participate (In Person!) in one of the most competitive Middle School debate tournaments in the country, next to tournaments like Stanford and NSDA Nationals. For many, this was their first in person tournament, and represents a bright future for Kudos in the coming years!

Everyone worked very hard to bring themselves to this point and showed great dedication throughout the tournament to improve our skills and enjoy our time debating.

Congratulations to the follow debaters: In Congress, Kudos placed 5 out of the 15 places in the Final Chamber.
John Dong placed 14th, Michelle Pan placed 12th, Zoey Luc placed 10th, Edwin Jiao placed 9th, and Audrey Huang placed 3rd!!

The combination of Audrey, Zoey, John, Edwin, and Michelle led Kudos to have ONE THIRD OF THE FINAL ROUND. This is the third straight year that Kudos has had the most congress finalists at MSTOC, and the second straight year that Kudos has had the most middle schoolers advancing to the elimination rounds. We’re so proud of everyone.

For Lincoln-Douglas debate, Michelle Zhang received 9th place overall Speaker award and advanced through octo finals into the quarter finals (top 8)!

The trip went very smoothly and everyone got along very well. Thank you to all students and parents on behalf of the Kudos Coaches for making this trip so great. Keep up the hard work!

Audrey Huang Congressional Debate3rd Place

Edwin Jiao Congressional Debate9th Place

Zoey Luc Congressional Debate10th Place

Michelle Pan Congressional Debate12th Place

John Dong Congressional Debate14th Place

Michelle Zhang Lincoln Douglas DebateTop 8 (Quarter Finalist)

Michelle Zhang Lincoln Douglas Speaker Award 9th Place

We want to start by sending a huge congratulation to each debater at this SCJFL tournament. They spoke on and debated about incredibly serious issues while history was unfolding in front of their eyes. Whether it was an analysis of NATO or considerations of the effects of conflicts on outer space, the Russian invasion of Ukraine played a role in these debates and I commend the students for being willing to adapt and learn on the fly as situations in the world developed.

Kudos represented final break rounds across both debate events at this tournament as well as taking home some 1st places!

For Lincoln Douglas: Pearl Hsieh, Yanzi Feng, and Sophia Ren advanced to the first set of break rounds with Yanzi and Sophia advancing into the set of final break rounds. Sophia claimed 7th overall with Yanzi taking 8th. Congratulations for advancing on such a competitive break for the tournament! To make it to the first set of break rounds, each debater required 3 wins out of 4 preliminary rounds. This LD entry list contained around ~60 students, so competition was tight. Very well done debaters.

For Public Forum, the team dove into the world of international military relations just as a major super power was taking action on the global stage. Through the evolving info, all debaters remained strong in their cases and focused on the big picture. For speaker awards Celina Zhou took 9th, Wesley Wang took 4th, and Claire Liu took 1st! Great job presenting not only strong cases, but also eloquent speeches. For placements, the teams of Doria Chen & Wesley Wang and Yuna Wu & Jerry Zhang advanced to the first set of break rounds with 3 wins. The teams of Claire Liu & Joyce Zhang and Harry Chen & Kaden Wong made it to the final set of break rounds! Harry and Kaden took 5th overall while Claire and Joyce claimed 1st place and were crowned Public Forum tournament champions! Huge congratulations to Claire and Joyce as well as all other debaters for their hard work and effort.

We are excited to start preparing for our end of the year tournaments and look forward to representing Kudos proudly.

We would like to start off with a huge congratulations to every participant at the Stanford-hosted Palm Classic International Speech and Debate Tournament.
Participants and judges hailed from around the country and world, representing 4 different time zones.
This was an incredibly competitive invitational and the students have been hard at work on their cases and individual speeches.
Another massive thank you to our judges, your efforts and commitment allowed us to compete in the first place.
Kudos was represented in break rounds by several speakers at this tournament, and I want to extend a specific congratulations to those students.

Let’s start with Congress. The Congress team competed in the Varsity division, which meant that the rounds contained students up to the 12th grade. Getting experience competing against high schoolers and succeeding is amazing. Huge congratulations to the entire congress team! With that being said, three students advanced into the semi and final rounds! Claire Wen made it into the semi finals! In the FINAL round of Varsity, Anne Liu placed 12th and Serena Guo placed 7th! Keep up the great work debaters!

Moving on to Lincoln Douglas. Kudos debater Sophia Ren made it all the way to the semi-final round of the Middle School Division. Out of 40 entries she broke into the top 8. On a 5-1 preliminary record, Sophia broke to quarterfinals then to semifinals, also securing 4th place overall speaker award! (This is a separate award based on speaker points not record).
W want to also extend a large thank you to Yanzi Feng, who had an impressive preliminary record of 4-2 and just barely missed the competitive break. Sh
e stayed to support and help prep Sophia for her break rounds, sharing cards and strategies she learned at the tournament. This is what being a team is all about.

I want to also congratulate the Public Forum team for running great arguments and powering through such a competitive tournament. Our after round discussions were incredibly productive and every one of our competitors is extremely bright. With our continued work, break rounds are just around the corner!

And finally, a big thank you to the parents. With your support throughout the year, bringing students to class, getting up early on the weekends to help get ready for tournaments, and helping them with research, all your work is appreciated.

This tournament is a long tradition in the competitive debate community and Kudos was proud to represent Southern California. We are looking forward to our upcoming tournaments at Harvard and SCJFL #3.

La Reina Speech and Debate Tournament Online 2021

Kudos wrapped up the year of 2021 with some great results. We sent middle school and high school students to compete in both speech and debate events. All four of our students are worthy of praise not only for their results, but for giving up their time to prepare for this tournament during winter break!

Onto the results: Fiona Zhou won HS congress as a freshman, capping off an incredible first semester in ninth grade. She did this by getting a 1 and a 3 from her two judges in all three rounds throughout the tournament. Despite the mathematical improbability of the feat, she showed her consistency as a talented debater. Shoutouts to freshman Claire Wen for getting top half in her chamber and freshman Alen Zhang for taking top half of the tournament. Alen accomplished this by getting ranked top five by every judge that saw him throughout the tournament.

Additionally, 7th grader Claire Chen cleaned up in the middle school speech side of the tournament. Claire finaled in both middle school impromptu, as well as middle school original oratory. Claire took 5th in OO and earned 6th place out of the 12 students who advanced to the final round in impromptu. The impromptu final was particularly noteworthy because it was one the largest speech events at the tournament. This continues Claire’s streak of finaling every time she enters in Impromptu and or OO. Claire deserves special praise for being 1 spot away from picket fencing (where a student gets a 1st place rank from every judge) in prelims for OO.

Kudos students head to their well deserved winter break. The students will be right back to speaking and debating in 2022. KUDOS!

2/27/2021 we had 22 elementary students participated in this online speech and debate tournament, this is a huge one, but our students did well in Novice Spar, and Declamation.
Kudos held a practice session the day before so every student can had a good warm up, the results speaks for itself.
Here’s the ranking and results:

Novice Spar :
1st place Yuna Wu
2nd place Joyce Zhang
4th place Alyssa Guo
5th place Cynthia Chao
11th place Isabella Meng

Declamation :
7th place Derek Hu

December 7, 2019 was the second SCJFL Elementary Tournament at Roosevelt Elementary School in San Gabriel, CA.

Kudos entered 10 of 161 students from 8 schools competing at the tournament!!!

Impromptu
Isabella Ma – 3rd place

Storytelling
Helen Li – 4th Place

Novice SPAR
Grace Yang – 6th Place