State Championship Week
The week before the biggest thing is always its own kind of beautiful. Everything feels sharp and worth keeping.
State || Debate || Preparation || Together
State was in Portland this year, at the convention center downtown, which meant the three hundred miles of travel that characterized most state championships were replaced by a fifteen-minute MAX ride, which should have been less dramatic and was somehow more. Something about being in your own city, in front of home judges, with the possibility that people who knew you — who knew Alex Reyes and Jamie Okafor and not just Team Jefferson — might be in the room. Mrs. Callahan had told us that the draw was excellent — teams from across the state, the mix that produced the best competition and therefore the best rounds. Franklin High was there, the team who had beaten us at regionals by two points. We would, if the bracket played out as projected, face them in the final.
The week before, Jamie and I practiced every day. Library, four hours, no days off. Mrs. Callahan ran two full mock rounds with other teams as our opponents, evaluating and critiquing with the specific combination of high standards and genuine investment that was her mode of caring about the people she coached. “Your affirmative case is the best first-year case I’ve seen in a decade,” she told us, after the last mock round. She was looking at me when she said it, which I suspected was intentional. “The argument has a pulse. Don’t lose that in the actual round. Don’t go back to the architecture when you get nervous.” I nodded. “And you,” she said to Jamie. “Your cross-examination is exceptional but you get formal when you feel challenged. Stay loose. The looseness is where your best thinking lives.” Jamie nodded. She looked at us together. “You make each other better,” she said. “That’s the partnership I want to see on Saturday.” She gathered her papers. She paused at the door. “For what it’s worth,” she said, in the tone she used for things she only said once. “I’ve been coaching for thirty years. The ones who win state are almost never the technically best teams. They’re the teams that care the most. About the argument and about each other.” She left. Jamie and I looked at each other across the library table. “She’s rooting for us,” I said. “Mrs. Callahan doesn’t root for people,” Jamie said. “She actively advances the success of people she has invested in,” I said. “That’s just rooting with better verbs.” Jamie smiled. “Okay,” they said. “Let’s run the case one more time.” We ran it. It was the best run we’d done. I argued the constructive from life, from the full depth of what the resolution meant to me — what I had spent the year learning it meant, in the specific and personal way that a person learned things by living them rather than by arguing them. And it had a pulse. It had the most pulse it had ever had, because I was the most completely myself I had ever been when arguing it, and there was nothing more powerful in a debate round than a person who meant every word they said.