OCC’s debate team wins national competition

Orange Coast College’s Speech, Debate and Readers’ Theater Team bested the top 60 teams in the country in national competition last week.

The troop took 14 members to the Phi Rho Pi National Forensics Organization’s event in Cleveland and closed out the weeklong contest with a score of 220 points including several gold medals in individual events. In second place with 190 points was their familiar opponent from state competition, Ventura County’s Moorpark College.

Orange Coast had achieved the highest score in the California Community College Forensic Assn.’s state championship — with Moorpark again in second. After that event in March, OCC had two weeks to prepare for nationals.

The team practiced every day in sessions as long as 10 hours, rehearsing speeches, going over debate strategies and performing theatrical presentations for the coaches. Team members determined which techniques worked best and which speeches to scrap and start over.

The national contest featured the same events as the state contest, such as the impromptu categories and Readers’ Theater, in which students perform a play written and rehearsed beforehand. The play, no longer than 25 minutes, expresses an argument on a topic chosen by the coaches.

For the national Readers’ Theater, the team took their two plays from state, “The Tower” and “Living Waters,” along with a new work, “720.”

The newest work won the gold medal in its category. The play’s topic expressed the power of translation in six scenes. The students got the audience into the act by asking which scene they would like to view first.

“The people watching would just shout out the scene number and we’d perform it,” student Alissa Duong said. “We did this to play up the differences in each scene and keep the audience guessing.”

The team members wanted the scenes to vary in dramatic levels. One scene depicted a Spanish speaker making a 911 call. The operator receiving the call cannot understand the speaker’s emergency. The speaker then hangs up because she cannot be helped.

To prepare for the tournament, the Orange Coast team arrived in Cleveland four days before the April 5 registration. Students and coaches described their 11-day trip as an intense bonding experience.

“We were taken out of the world that we live in, which challenged us to be better,” student Dorri Mang said. “Win or lose, we are always a team.”

For coach Chris DeSurra, the big win was his final hurrah.

“This competition is an incredible send-off for me since I’m retiring,” DeSurra said. “These students have jobs, studies and personal lives but they work tremendously hard for this team.”