Blank Slate Improv rehearsing

Blank Slate Improv

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They Tell You To “Do Your Best But Just Have Fun.” Improv Is The Only Thing Where That Is Actually True.

“I torched a bakery, for sure. Never considered bakeries beautiful, myself. They’re cesspools of human society.”

That was one of many lines from the Blank Slate improv team that had me smothering laughs so that I wouldn’t disturb their process.

I felt like I was intruding on a secret gathering in the prop-laden improv practice room. From my scratched-up leather armchair in the corner, I watched the team practice in the space between five couches that framed the room. The couches, dusty and floral with cushions that had sunken in the middle, looked like they had been looted from my great grandmother’s attic.

“Pick a seat, Sam, but choose wisely,” senior computer science major Caleb Atkins said as I came in, indicating the comical number of seats I had to choose from.

When even their furniture made me laugh, I knew I was in for a fun evening. Cardboard and wood theater sets lined the walls behind the grandma couches, and suspicious stains (coffee? paint?) littered the green carpet at my feet.

They were having fun, and from my spot in the corner I felt like I was having fun with them. I was experiencing a form of escapism even in the practice room; that environment was cultivated by the team.

The first Blank Slate show I attended was during Union University’s Scholars of Excellence weekend. College and high school students filled every seat in the chapel. The team stood elevated on a stage with spotlights pooled around their feet and a full audience at their disposal. After having survived another difficult week, I settled into the seat beside my roommate and let the comedic escapism settle my problems for an hour or two.

That craving for reverie was the only similarity between my first improv show and this practice. Tonight, I was not part of the audience. I was the audience.

Even in PAC D-8, the improv team played through their games the same way they would in the intimidating chapel scene. It looked like kids playing pretend but more grown up somehow. They reminded me of when I would play with my siblings in the living room floor. At the same time, they were an intentionally structured group.

After each interaction, they analyzed: where were you in the scene? Who were you? What was your relationship to each other? They acknowledged where their scene dragged, and they talked through it together.

They paused to be certain they were on the same page in the scene, but they didn’t need to. They stepped into the middle of the room, and without discussing it beforehand, they seemed to step into the same scene together.

“[During call-backs] we try to get them in games to see how they mesh with the team,” Atkins, captain of Blank Slate, said about their process of choosing a new member. “And Matt Randall was the shining star of it all.”

Although 23 people came to the first audition, the improv team seemed to know in short time who would make it to the finish line. Matt Randall, a sophomore film studies major, is the newest member of Blank Slate Improv.

“After [the last] audition,” Randall said, “they emailed me the same night and told me I’d been accepted.”

“Oh wow,” I said. “So you just kind of knew right away?”

“Yeah, yeah. They emailed me like, an hour afterwards. It was great,” Randall said.

He seemed to fit in without a hitch. You could tell me that Randall has been on the team for years, and I would say, “Oh, yeah. You’re right. Matt has always been here.”

“Call-backs ended,” Atkins said, laughing, “and we all looked at each other like, ‘Okay, so Matt, right?’ There were a bunch of really phenomenal people at call-backs as well, but I think Matt stood out as somebody we really wanted on the team.”

Watching Randall interact with the rest of the improv team brought me back to that sense of escapism. For two hours at the end of a long day, I could laugh as the team “sat” in an “office,” standing on tiptoe to talk to each other over their “cubicles” (a scene Adkins later described as “so much fun”). For the stressed college student, a sanctioned 2-hour laughing spell is cathartic.

“[Improv] made me really nostalgic,” Randall gestured as though to describe a scene on the table between us. “[Everyone] tells you, ‘Do your best but just have fun.’ Improv is the only thing where that’s true.”

“I enjoy how cohesive we are,” Atkins said, describing the Blank Slate team. “Doing improv with them has been such a joy. They’re so kind and cooperative, and we all communicate so well at this point. It’s been great to have their friendship in that regard, even outside of improv.”

Follow Blank Slate Improv on Instagram @blankslateimprov to see their upcoming show dates.

This article was originally published here on The Cardinal and Cream website.

Journalism Awards New Endowed Scholarship

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Debate Team 2021

Union University Debate Team Wins IPDA National Tournament

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Last weekend, Union University’s debate team won the IPDA National Tournament, which was hosted virtually with over 62 schools and 132 teams competing.

Rebekah Whitaker is the director of the debate team and the assistant professor of communication arts at Union. This is her second year coaching Union’s debate team. However, this was her first appearance as the coach at Nationals, since last year they were canceled due to COVID-19.

Several individuals such as Steven Errico and Josh Johnson placed and won awards in the national tournament. Errico and Johnson were the first-place team and won first and third-place speakers, respectively. Jack McDonnell won first-place novice speaker, which is a division with students who have not competed in high school. Caleb Atkins won first place in the professional division, which includes coaches.

“The professional division is full of veteran competitors who have trounced me on many occasions in the past, so I couldn’t help but think ‘this has been fun, but this is as far as I’m going to make it’ with each new round I entered,” said Atkins, junior computer science major. “The team was incredibly supportive throughout the whole process and made sure I was prepared for every round before I went in, so the victory is just as much mine as theirs.”

The debate team faced some unique challenges due to the digital nature of the tournament, including more competitors than usual and some connection issues. A large thunderstorm hit Jackson on Friday during the third virtual round of debate. Union lost all power and Wi-Fi for a time.

“Students quickly hopped on their hot spots (many sharing them), and debated in the dark,” Whitaker said. “Some students couldn’t get connected to any internet, so they had to forfeit their rounds, but we still were abundantly excellence-driven.”

They finished the season with first place overall in the season-long sweepstakes and with many season-long awards, including first place in the novice category by Katherine Anne Thierfelder and first place by the novice squad as a whole. The whole team won first place for the Scholastic and Founders Awards as well.

“The team worked so hard completing 300 practice rounds to prepare for the tournaments this year. Yes, 300. It is incredibly rewarding to see their hard work pay off after a long, weird year,” said Whitaker. “I am simply blessed to be walking alongside them/guiding them as they do the heavy lifting. And now, I get to plan how we are going to continue that trajectory next year and beyond.”

Brigadoon: The Final Bow Of Professor David Burke

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Professor David Burke began our tour two days before opening night for the production Brigadoon behind the set itself. I introduced myself and went to shake his hand.

“Oh I shouldn’t,” he said, holding up his hands so I could see how they were covered in shades of black, green and gray paint.

I had interrupted him while he was working on the set piece for the production of Brigadoon that would run from Thursday to the following Tuesday.

He lives for set building.

“I was a college drop-out for about five years,” he said. “For those five years I was not in college, I became a carpenter. I moved to Idaho as a hippie.”

This reminded me of my time in theatre, how when you show up to auditions there were times when you were cut from a show and had to take a break from the stage. While other times, you got the comedic role and the next you were the one to bring the audience to tears.

Burke has constant humility in his leadership and the willingness to even do the clean up required to prepare the stage for that night’s dress rehearsal. But beyond that, he has become a mentor and leader to many of the students in the department.

“He’s like a father figure to many of us,” Noah Leake, senior accounting major, told me after curtain call of the opening night of Brigadoon.

He has guided many of the students, even the students who are not theatre majors, but who have been drawn to the stage.

“If I ever skipped a chapel I was always in his office talking to him, just about life,” Leake said.

Burke is not a man of few words, but as we sat in the audience looking at the set that they created he finally told me, “We are not praising God for saving us, we are praising Him for creating us.”

God was the first creator, and to be more like Him, you need to learn to create, to allow yourself to be molded like clay into what God has designed you for.

Ultimately, that means listening to God when He calls you in a different direction. Burke told me that his plan was to retire when he was 70 and had been around the theatre for 35 years. The Lord had different plans because of his heart condition that caused him to need a double bypass open heart surgery.

“God, I will stay as long as you want me to stay, and I will only go when you clearly tell me it’s time to go.”

It was when Burke was in the hospital recovering from the surgery that he heard the Lord tell him that it was time to take his bow, move aside and allow someone else to lead.

Since February 1, 2019, the cast and crew along with a team of outside volunteers have worked to design and create the sets and costumes from the ground up, just as Burke had done with Union University’s theatre program when arriving here 34 years ago.

When he arrived at Union University in 1986, he told me there was a stage that was about 20×20, made up of platforms that were all different heights. “They had taken carpet and stapled it over the top of it so people wouldn’t trip.”

Since then, he has built platforms for the chairs in the audience, purchased the chairs and lighting and recentered the purpose of the department. A purpose not only to entertain but to enlighten, to teach and to glorify the Lord in all things.

Now it’s show time. The costumes have been finished and the ticket ripped at the door.

Brigadoon. Burke’s first musical in college as a performer, when he played the role of Jeff Douglas, is now his last show as director.  

Within moments the audience will be laughing and sitting at the edge of their seats. With all the accents, all the costumes and the 50 ft wide and 13.5 ft tall set, the audience is immediately thrown back to a land that will bring sacrifice, love and maybe a little magic.

By the end of Act One, the audience is ready to join the chorus.

“It makes me want to pull out my kilt,” Michael Horton, senior psychology major, said once the lights came up.

Brigadoon will throw the audience through all forms of emotions, whether it’s laughing with or at Jeff Douglas, played by Timothy Fletcher, or crying along with Fiona MacLaren, played by Grace Runkle, who gives a wonderful performance and pulls at the heartstrings of the audience. This is a show that draws on all of Union’s talent to bring such a professional performance.   

As Burke takes his final bow and prepares to say goodbye to his role as director on March 19, 2019, Brigadoon is something that shouldn’t be missed by anyone.

This article first appeared in the Cardinal and Cream Website.

Union Debate Continues To Be Excellence Driven

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The Union University debate team competed at Louisiana Tech University this past weekend and came home with an assortment of titles and a greater sense of confidence.

The debate team won first in overall sweepstakes and in individual debate sweepstakes. Individual Union debaters won first place in novice (Amily Huddleston), junior varsity (Grant McLemore), varsity (Danielle Popson) and pro (Josh Swafford) divisions. Union also won first place speaker in the varsity division.

Rebekah Whitaker, visiting assistant professor of communication arts and director of debate, said that the team has come together in such a beautiful way that makes her excited about the rest of this season. Since it is still early in the season, competition will continue to get more and more difficult, but Whitaker said that the team is hopeful about the rest of the season.

“Overall, I feel like we grew in confidence this weekend as a team,” said Whitaker. “All of the first year debaters made it to elimination rounds. Every single one of them did.”

Whitaker said that some of her favorite moments of the weekend were not the competition itself or the great success of the team. Even though all of those were great, some of her favorite moments took place before competition began, on the seven hour bus trip, and in simple conversations with debaters.

“We hold a service at tournaments that require us to be gone on Sundays, and we have tried to make that something that we open up to other teams as well,” said Whitaker. “Students have found great ways to open Gospel-centered conversations with other debaters, which is the real heart behind what we do.”

Whitaker said that part of what sets Union’s debate team apart is that they constantly strive to debate ethically and remind each other to speak with grace and mercy, a motto of sorts for Whitaker.

“I am extremely proud of the hard work that my teammates have put into this activity, for their accomplishments, and more importantly, for the way they have conducted themselves as ambassadors for Christ on the debate circuit,” said JD Logan, senior political science major and debate team captain.

The debate team takes a weekend off this weekend for fall break, but they jump right back into their season on Oct. 18 with a debate tournament in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Photo courtesy of Union University

This article first appeared in The Cardinal & Cream website

Creator Profile: Sullivan Hogan

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The first time I ever met Sullivan Hogan was in a theater class.

I, a non-theater major, walked into the room to see her, a theater major, sitting in a faded red loveseat, one of the many chairs from previous productions that occupied the theater room. Having never met me, she immediately introduced herself, along with her fellow classmates, and I remember how personable it felt.

Hogan prides herself on being personable.

Sullivan Hogan, or Sully, as she is commonly known, is a junior theater and digital media communications double major from St. Louis. For as long as she remembers, she has loved entertaining people with her characters. From her 1st grade Thanksgiving play, in which she starred as Elizabeth the pilgrim, to her part-time job portraying costumes of Daffy Duck and Sylvester the Cat in high school, Hogan loves bringing to life her assigned personas.

Hogan hopes to bring that same passion to her starring role as Nora Helmer in “A Doll’s House” this November, as Union University’s theater department tackles Henrik Ibsen and Thomas Ostermeier’s feminist tour de force. Hogan refers to Nora as “one of [her] most impressive roles to date.”

One thing Hogan makes very clear about her role as Nora is how impactful it is.

“I’m on the stage for almost the entirety of the show, which means I am acting the entire time,” Hogan says. She seems half giddy and half nervous about her extended stage presence throughout the program, but continuously comes back to how her performance will resonate with the audience.

Hogan’s love of the stage thrives on her wanting the audience to connect with her characters. When asked about the true reasoning behind her passion for theater, she alludes to a more intimate connection than most people are used to today.

“A great performance is able to make the theater seem smaller,” Hogan says passionately. “My favorite performances are the ones where people come up to me after the show and tell them how much they needed to see the show and what my character meant to them.”

In the end, that’s really what Hogan sees as the big picture: God calling her to connect with people through her performances.

Professor David Burke, former director of Union’s theater program, would always say that “theater is the most difficult calling God can give.” Hogan takes that message to heart.

From the first time I met her, Hogan seemed intent on making me feel included. The first time I saw her in a performance, as Nurse Kelly in last year’s “Harvey,” I saw how well she connected with an audience. Sitting across from her in this crowded coffee shop, watching her greet a handful of students as she walked in, I see that those connections aren’t just between a fictional character and an audience member in a state of suspended disbelief, but a connection between someone willing to use the gift God gave her and those receptive to it.

Nora from “A Doll’s House” is famous for her door slam heard ‘round the world. It’s Hogan’s job to make it heard by you.

This article first appeared in The Cardinal & Cream Website

Drake Secures National Title In Final Season As Head Of Union’s Debate Team

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Dr. Web Drake, department chair of communication arts, closed out his time as the head of Union’s debate team with yet another national title this past week in Shreveport, Louisiana.

There was a representative of Union in the finals of four of the five divisions, securing enough overall points for the victory. This included team captain Josh Swafford, a senior political science major, who was determined to pull out the title, especially after falling just a few points short of the regular season championship.

“Personally this is my favorite nationals I’ve attended,” Swafford said. “I saw several members achieve personal goals that they had not been able to accomplish during the regular season, and I saw our team rally in the face of adversity to take home the national championship. As the captain, it was everything I could’ve asked for and more.”

Swafford was also determined to win for Drake with this being his last season with the team.

“It was especially great to send Dr. Drake off with such a big win,” said Swafford. “He has had such an amazing legacy at Union and in building the debate team into what it is today.”

Drake was not only influential in their lives as a debate coach, but as a man of Christ as well, according to Swafford. The awards ceremony ran high with emotions from both the students and Drake himself, and Swafford stated that the memories made will never be forgotten.

Drake feels that this is the largest amount of progress he has seen one of his teams make in a single season.

“We had 19 people for whom this was their first year of debate, more than any team I’ve ever had,” said Drake. “That is a whole lot of energy and enthusiasm, but it is also a whole lot of inexperience. But they worked so hard. And by nationals, they were debaters. They earned that title.”

Drake will leave the program with great pride in what it has accomplished. The efforts made by both the students and the support of administration and faculty is not lost on him.

“It’s been a communal effort, and I am just glad that I’ve been allowed to come along for the ride,” said Drake. “I’m glad my final team will be one that is hard to leave.”

Photo courtesy of Brent Walker

This article first appeared in The Cardinal and Cream website.

Senior Profile: Alex Russell

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Union sees many students coming in and out of school. We can agree that most are great, but only a few stand out. I can safely say that Alex Russell, a senior communications major, stands out among the crowd. From free-style rapping to sporadic comedic moments, Russell has it all. To capture his true aura, I am keeping the conversation exactly as it is.

*Russell leans into the mic*

Russell: “Oh, hello. This is Alex Russell, and we have Andrew Waddey interviewing me today.”

Waddey: “Thank you for the introduction. Let’s start off with how the last semester is treating you so far.”

*Russell lets out a slight chuckle*

Russell: “You know, I have to be honest. It’s been good. A lot of that stress comes with the last semester of senior year, whether that that’s finding a job or figuring out where you’re going to live after college. The Lord really revealed, even though I’m very stressed throughout the semester, that I can find comfort in His timing.”

Waddey: “I understand. I would also like to talk about some of the things you’ve done in your time here.”

Russell: “Yeah, yeah, fo sho. So achievement wise, I think really something that I kind of take value from is developing into my personality and learning how to be myself, which sounds a little cliché, but it’s honestly true.”

Waddey: “What was it that contributed to that?”

Russell: “Ultimately I feel like it’s the people I’ve been in contact with. There is value in each and every person no matter their past, and that’s something I had to learn about myself, that I had to accept my value. I only allude to that because it was everything leading up to through what I’ve done, like the Student Activities Council. I could find areas in there where I could develop my personality along with my talent.”

Waddey: “Don’t you also have a reputation in rapping?”

Russell: “Oh no.”

*We both laugh*

Waddey: “You and I haven’t had too many conversations, but when people mention you they mention your raps on Instagram.”

Russell: “Oh I’m so sorry.”

*We both laugh again*

Russell: “Kind of the background to that is um… late high school I listened to Christian rap artists, and then from there I went to more secular artists. Kind of went back and forth based on what I liked to hear. The first thing I did was practice learning from the artist Andy Mineo. It was one of his first albums that had a song called “Michael Jackson.”

Waddey: “I’ve never heard of that song.”

Russell: “Well there’s this really fast part where he goes ‘I go by M-I-N-E-O, but it really don’t matter, bury me with no tombstone…’ and it picks up. I’ll play it for you after we’re done. Anyways, long story short, I just found that really fun, and I wanted to memorize it specifically to get to that fast part. I found that to be very exciting.”

Waddey: “Yeah I actually got to see him in concert.”

Russell: “Oh nice! The rapping started with other songs and spaces where I thought I could fill in when there was no other person singing or rapping. I would fill in Andy Mineo lyrics to other songs and eventually just instrumentals.”

Waddey: “That’s really cool.”

Russell: “And then eventually that just evolved into ‘how can I make this my own?’ and it really just became a creative exercise where I could practice thinking on my feet. It’s something that I just really enjoyed doing in the car… in private obviously.”

Waddey: “And it eventually just picked up here?”

Russell: “Yeah, I haven’t done many projects publicly, and I don’t have too many recorded sessions even privately, but I do have a couple. But a lot of it really is something that I do in my free time in the car.”

Waddey: “Do you do a lot of free-styling?”

Russell: “Oh that’s all I do. So before V-Show, we had a portion of our show that we got to rap, and I wrote down something to the beat to memorize and perform. I didn’t give myself enough time really, but I kept on trying to memorize it but I couldn’t. At one point I tried for two hours and I couldn’t, so I was like ‘well this sucks’ because I really wanted to perform it. I decided to just freestyle the middle section because I could get down the first part and I knew where it was going to end. It didn’t go perfect, but I still had a lot of fun. I don’t have any plans for a rap career or even anything just music related, but just to recognize that there is some talent that is a gift from the Lord and to use that ability not just to rap but to think on my feet.

Waddey: “Has it been a while since you’ve put anything out?”

Russell: “Yes, yeah it has. I haven’t released or worked on anything other than in the car.”

To finish our interview, Russell was so gracious enough to give a sample free-style as a closure to our short time together.

“Uh.. Yo/Ay, I just got interviewed today/By Andrew Waddey, man it was so amaz-ing/I don’t think I could say it any eloquent way/But the way he asked me questions I thought ‘Man, imagine what a world we live in/where all the children/think we going to Heaven’/But all I know is that there’s a higher bein’/That watches over when we go to sleepin’/Oh shoot/Hold up/I’m about to come up to the corner and stroll up/you lookin’ really cool/I’m gonna call you fruit rollup/cause every time you talk to me I wanna say… ‘shut up’/But not really, because I like the way you talk/You got a funny way/The way that you go ‘squak!’/I like the way you move girl/You got that body bangin’/Oh shoot lady let me see you in the a.m./I’m tryin’ to take away the pain/This is like the nomacain/I just wanna throw down… nomacain is not a word by the way.”

Graphic Courtesy of Campbell Padgett

This article first appeared in The Cardinal & Cream website.

When Everybody Needs To Laugh

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It was February 2017. I was a senior in high school. I was on Union’s campus for a Scholars of Excellence weekend. I had no idea what I was doing, but this was the weekend when I needed to at least pretend like I knew what I was doing.

It was a Friday night. I guess I had checked in, and I don’t know what else I did that night. It was one of those events where you get a name tag. You know, the ones that make you stand out—the ones that take away any chance of you passing as a Union student.

On the back of my name tag, I found a schedule for the events of the weekend. This is exactly what I needed that weekend. I could casually look at the back of my name tag and have the details I needed in order to look like I knew what was going on.

“Improv show- Barefoots Joe,” I read on the schedule for Friday night.

I had no idea what that meant, but I am sure that I asked my only friend on campus that weekend if she was going to the show. I didn’t know what I was going to, but at least I had something to do and someone to sit with.

Looking back, I think that I was expecting more of an open mic type of event. I hadn’t heard of an improv team before, so senior me was just expecting people from the crowd to improvise. I’m not really sure what I expected, but it was probably something along the lines of people from the crowd just going on stage and doing whatever they wanted. It sounds silly now, but I just didn’t know.

That night I crowded into Barefoots with a bunch of nervous high school seniors (and some overly confident ones), as well as many current Union students. I sat on the floor at the left corner of the stage and laughed—like the whole show.

This was not what I had expected, but this is what I needed. I needed something else to think about other than the scholarship competition coming up the next day. I needed a reason to laugh instead of worry.

* * *

“They pay us with macaroni,” said Clark Hubbard, captain of Union’s Blank Slate Improv team.

Everyone laughed…again.

The show was in Barefoots again. It was Halloween night 2018. It was a Wednesday night. I had homework due the next day that I had not started on. The show started after 9 p.m., yet there I was sitting in Barefoots.

I looked around me. Extra chairs had been brought in to comfortably accommodate all the students.

“Why are there so many people here?” I thought.

It was a school night. It was late. It was Halloween, yet there were people sitting all around me. I was surrounded by laughter.

“Why do we keep coming out to these shows? What’s so funny?”

These were the questions running through my mind as the show got started.

Maybe it’s because everyone has this desire to be funny, and we live vicariously through the Blank Slate Improv team.

Maybe it’s because our friends are the ones on stage, and we feel like we have an inside track with the team.

Or maybe it has to do with the way improv looks at issues, stereotypes and Union culture from a unique perspective.

Whatever it is that makes people come—that draws people in—I think it ultimately comes from our need for laughter.

College is great. College can also be stressful. Blank Slate Improv provides the campus with a period of time simply to laugh.

Sometimes it doesn’t even take words. One person in the crowd starts laughing at a simple gesture or expression by one of the team members, and suddenly everyone in the crowd is laughing. There’s just something about laughter that can be so contagious.

It’s funny because no one knows what to expect—not even the team members. It’s funny because that’s not the voice he normally uses. It’s funny because the team members have to think on their feet and feed off of each other even if they have no idea what another person is thinking.

It’s funny because we need to laugh.

I mean, who would have thought that a room full of college students would have laughed so hard when a tall guy said, “They pay us with macaroni”?

It was all of the little details of the scene that made the room laugh.

It was all of the little details of the whole show on Wednesday night that made the crowd verbalize their disappointment when captain Ben Johnson said, “Alright guys, we only have one more game.”

***

If you were one of the ones expressing your disappointment at the closure of the show on Wednesday night (or if you are now expressing your disappointment in not attending the show), you still have a chance to join Blank Slate Improv for another show this Saturday, Nov. 3, at 7 p.m.

Blank Slate will be opening for Anthem Lights in the G.M. Savage Memorial Chapel.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m., so pick up tickets in advance at Union Station and be there early for the show on Saturday.

After all, they say laughter is the best medicine.

Image courtesy of Tamara Friesen

This article first appeared in The Cardinal & Cream website.

DebateTeamChamps2018

Union Debate Team Wins National Championship

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With Union President Samuel “Dub” Oliver in attendance, the Union University Debate Team won the national tournament for the second consecutive year and the season-long title for the fifth consecutive year in a competition held on March 24-27 in Spokane, Washington.

The season-long title, called the Founders’ Award, is given to the team with the most points from its top six tournaments earned over the entire season. Because Union only attended six tournaments prior to nationals, every tournament counted toward the title. Union was one of 124 teams competing for the title.

The national tournament victory is the team’s fifth in eight years. While about 20-25 students normally go to tournaments throughout the season, fifteen Union students competed in the national tournament against 55 other teams.

Debate cultivates skills such as public speaking, critical thinking, teamwork, social skills, social maturity and the ability to deal with wins and losses, as well as a broader knowledge in a wide variety of subjects. Union’s debate team has won more tournaments at the national level than any other national competitor in the past eight years.

Dr. Web Drake, head coach of Union’s debate team and department chair of the communication arts department, has been coaching collegiate debate since 1998. Drake notes that, despite its growth throughout the year, the team faced some challenges.

“We integrated a lot of new people onto the team this year, so we had a little bit of a culture shift this year,” Drake said. “The young folks, the novices, and the JV folks really stepped up and did a great job. This year was more about maintenance, maintaining the area that we’re in. Sometimes staying on the top of the mountain can be just as difficult as getting to the top.”

Drake says that having Oliver travel with the team to the tournament was a “delight” and that Drake is content with the team’s accomplishments.

“We just had a really successful run,” Drake said. “It was a really close tournament. We only won by three points. It was really, really close. It was a nail-biter right down to the very end. Great competition. Great kids. They really represented themselves, they represented Union, they represented their Savior really, really well. I was very proud of the work that they did.”

WhiteMathisCelebrate

Juliana White and Jacob Mathis exult in the team’s victory at nationals.

Juliana White, freshman TESOL major and debate team member, was one of the competitors in the tournament. White, who won second place in the novice division, was instrumental in securing the team’s national championship.

The tournament is based on a point system. White, who debated the rise and fall of the stock market and argued that the stock market’s volatility is a sign of things to come, gained two points from winning her semifinal round and one point from competing in her final round. The team won the tournament by three points.

White, who had no prior experience in debate before coming to Union last fall, says that she has grown in teamwork, knowledge and presentation skills since joining the team.

“It’s just been really helpful to learn from my teammates and their different areas of expertise and different walks of life and just grow in knowledge and hear other people’s opinions and experiences,” White said. “I’ve also grown in my ability to present myself and present ideas in a way that is concise and coherent in order to just present an argument and formulate ideas. That’s something that’s really important to do in just any way of life, to be able to present information well.”

White says that one of the biggest blessings about competing in the debate circuit is the opportunity to develop relationships with students from other schools.

“I’ve made several friends within the circuit already this year, and I know that other teammates have friends from other schools that they’ve debated against for years,” White said. “It’s really awesome to be able to be salt and light. That’s something that we say as a debate team, we want to be salt and light among the circuit and among our fellow debaters. It’s just been really a blessing to be able to do that this year.”

To recognize and celebrate the team’s achievements, Jackson Mayor Jerry Gist proclaimed April 5 to be Union University Debate Team Day last week.

Image courtesy of Juliana White
This article first appeared in The Cardinal & Cream website.