At 5.pm tonight, the Speech & Debate team will make their way to the Eastern Missouri Districs tournament in Clayton and Pattonville High Schools. This is a tournament which could qualify them directly to the national competition.

Imai Anabayan, sophomore, Akash Sarkar, sophomore, and Mandar Bhoyar, along with about 30 others will look to qualify for nationals, a task they consider to be difficult.

“The competition’s gonna be very tough and we’re expecting that, but we’re going for a lot of experience,” Anabayan said.

Anabayan is paired with Sarkar, this group will debate about wether or not the United States should keep its military base in Okinawa, Japan. Their strategy is based on trying to make their case as neutral as possible for the judge.

“We’ve went with a plan of, when we’re talking about getting the base out of there, we have conservative arguments so both liberals and conservative judges will like that appeal, and when we’re talking about keeping the base we also go with liberal arguments so both liberals and conservatives will like that,” Sarkar said.

For the tournament as a whole the team is looking to gain more experience in order to get back on this level next year and have a better chance of qualifying for nationals.

“I think we’ll take a lot out of it, and that’s how we’ll improve for next year, that’ll be good for us to do well next year,” Sarkar said.

The experience of a tournament with this magnitude should help this team, whose year, according to Bhoyar, has “not been the best”.

“My partner graduated last year, so I had to change my partner, and my[current partner] is a freshman so she had no previous debating background,” Bhoyar said.

Bhoyar, who wouldn’t be available for nationals even if the team qualified, is also looking to get experience from districts.

“Since i’m not going to be in the United States for nationals, all i’m doing is gaining some experience.” he said