What an exciting start of the competition year this has been. While this tournament had some tech and judging issues, our team powered through as best as we could. The tournament itself ran quite on time and we hope to see that in future tournaments as well.

We’ll start first with our biggest event for the tournament by far: Congress. Kudos secured 11 out of the 12 finalist spots in congress. Kudos also had the top 2 Presiding Officers in the prelims: Tim Cai and Larry Zhou. Larry Zhou moved on to be the finalist PO, great work! As for the congress debaters themselves: Micah Yeung placed 12th, Larry Zhou placed 11th, Ayden Fang placed 10th, Michelle Pan placed 9th, Michelle Zhang placed 8th, Linda Jiang placed 7th, Katherine Dian placed 6th, Julianna Cui placed 4th, Serena Guo placed 3rd, Evelyn Lam placed 2nd, and Anne Lou placed 1st! Fantastic work by the congress team!

For the other debate formats of the competition, Kudos students also found great success! 4 Kudos Public Forum teams advanced to the first out round with one team advancing into the final out round. Making the top 10 break was Kathleen Chen & Madeline Wong, Yuna Wu & Isabella Meng, and Belle Huang & Celina Zhou. Advancing further and taking 2nd place overall in Public Forum was Claire Liu & Joyce Zhang!
In addition to debating well, high performing speakers are awarded with individual speaking awards with Joyce Zhang getting 5th overall and Claire Liu getting 1st overall! Fantastic work!

Finally, LIncoln-Douglas student Yanzi Feng was able to advance to the final outround of the tournament, securing 6th place overall and 9th best overall speaker in Lincoln-Douglas! Great work!

Congratulations to everyone who competed in this tournament! Each and every member of the team contributes to our overall success. The first tournament of the year can always be tough but the students handled this tournament with grace and energy. These students put in the work on very complicated topics and regardless of tournament result, each student learned A LOT these past weeks. We cannot wait until our next tournaments!

Here are some tournament photos and results~