Mission High School coach Tadd Scott (left) celebrates with Novice Champions Janny Ye and Alinah Torno at the Skyline High School Tournament.

This year marked the BAUDL’s second in existence and the first of its ambitious plan to expand across the Bay to introduce debate to San Francisco high schools.  BAUDL and the San Francisco Unified School District agreed to launch debate teams in three high schools – Mission High, Balboa High, and Downtown High – to join those already operating in 12 high schools in Oakland. In each of these new schools, debate has caught on strongly.  Our expansion into San Francisco helped us reach our goal of reaching 250 students participating in our programs this year.

San Francisco Unified’s schools were hardly intimidated by their relative inexperience compared to their cross-bay competitors.  The team from Mission High ended the year by winning the Novice Division Championship in the last regular-season tournament. Better yet, Zachary Delle and Alan Lin from Balboa High qualified as one of the two teams representing BAUDL at the Chase National Urban Debate Championship tournament held in New York City, and came home from that tournament with an impressive 3-3 record.  With results like this after only a year of debating, we are excited to see what our San Francisco debaters will achieve in the future.