Potomac School Speech and Debate Team Excels

From The Potomac School: The Potomac School speech and debate team has seen success at multiple tournaments this year. Led by Coach Harry Strong, the team has excelled while competing against other high school debaters from across the nation and around the world.

Senior Quentin Levin and junior Will Thompson kicked off a year of successes by winning the Georgetown University Public Forum Tournament last October. That tournament included 75 teams from nine states.

In February, sophomores Jessica Kwon and Max Shenkman took first place in the junior varsity division of the Harvard National Forensics Tournament. The pair was undefeated and seeded #2 out of 263 teams in the preliminary rounds.

Also in February, Potomac junior Tom Rollins won the Washington-Arlington Catholic Forensic League metro finals in extemporaneous speaking. This victory qualified him to compete in the Catholic Forensic League’s national championships, which will take place in Louisville over Memorial Day weekend.

In addition, Potomac students have excelled in the international style of high school debate, called World Schools Debate. At a recent international tournament in Dallas, the school’s team defeated teams from Argentina and Canada.

In addition to coaching the speech and debate team, Harry Strong serves as Potomac’s K-12 director of public speaking; in this capacity, he works with teachers at all grade levels to integrate public speaking skills and practice into the curriculum. Strong joined the Potomac community in July 2016, after serving as director of forensics at Battle Ground Academy in Tennessee. In 2014, when he was a faculty member at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, he was named National Speech and Debate Coach of the Year by the National Speech & Debate Association.

Image via The Potomac School