Harvard Wins National Debate Tournament For First Time in 26 Years

As the country tuned in to the men’s basketball national championship game on Monday night, another tournament—the oldest intercollegiate academic competition in the United States—was wrapping up at same time.

In the 70th National Debate Tournament championship, Harvard Debate Council members David J. Herman ’16 and Hemanth Sanjeev ’18 defeated a team from the University of Kansas to bring home the trophy for the first time in 26 years.

“It’s obviously pretty cool,” Herman said. “We got a bunch of emails and messages from alumni of the team of the team from 10, 20, 30 years ago who were pretty excited that we had finally broken the streak.”

Though Harvard usually attends the tournament and partook in the final four for the last three years, Harvard hadn't won the national championship since 1990.

“It’s history,” assistant debating coach Sherry A. Hall said. Hall had only coached for two years when Harvard last won the national championship nearly 30 years ago.

“It kind of came so early in my career that I don’t know that I fully appreciated the win,” she said. “We had a bunch of second place ones, and this was our third year in a row being in the final four, so it’s not like we haven’t had any success, but we weren’t quite ever able to get back there.”

The win is coach Dallas G. Perkins’s third in his coaching career at Harvard. He echoed Hall’s sentiments in a press release.

“A lot goes into winning the [tournament]: long and careful preparation, countless hours of practice, and a bit of luck,” he wrote. “We have had some extremely talented teams over the past quarter-century, but none better than Hemanth and David.”

The pair’s run through the single-elimination tournament started with the team’s reception for the Copeland Award, which they were awarded for being ranked first in the entering 78-team field. After three days of preliminary competition, Harvard was then seeded seventh in the single-elimination bracket.

Their run through the tournament included wins over a Michigan State University team, the United States Military Academy in the round of 16, Georgetown University in the elite eight, the top Michigan State University team in the final four, and finally the University of Kansas in the championship round.

Herman attributed the win to both hard work and luck.

“Part of it is not just how hard you work—there’s also some measure of luck given the way the tournament is structured kind of like March Madness, where you have very high probability of random stuff going wrong,” Herman said. “It’s obviously very cool to win, and to meet the expectations of everyone who came before us.”