When Great Minds Mingle
By TONY WANG ’20
The Milton Academy Speech and Debate Team and the Robotics Team received numerous awards from two travel tournaments this past weekend. As a representative of Milton’s Speech and Debate team, I can safely state that travel tournaments are demanding, but I also fully acknowledge that success is a product of this intense dedication. The tournaments’ overall travel-experience has proven very fruitful, and Milton should create more travel opportunities for its teams so that students are able to pursue their passions on a broader, more enriching level.
Two key advantages make a strong case for instilling a travel component for team competitions. Firstly, the prospect of traveling and the goal of succeeding at these esteemed tournament encourages an efficiency in teamwork. Indeed, the prerequisite expenses—in money, time, and energy—to attend the tournament serve as a powerful motivator; when such commitments are made, the team feels a degree of healthy pressure to perform and excel. Personally, I am well-acquainted with this line of thinking: why would we be traveling across states to a debate tournament if not to succeed there? The higher stakes of travel tournaments play the role of a healthy stimulus for the Milton team’s competitors. Before away tournaments, Debate kids spend hours in contemplation of key concepts, in-depth discussion of arguments, and mock debates. The same goes for robotics. Dima Zayaruzny ’21, a member of the Robotics Team who attended the recent tournament, stated that members of Robotics frequently hold Friday night meetings that may last up to 5 hours in order to perfect the design and operation of their robots. Some members work during their free periods as well. Their hard work and resilience are driven by their goal of excelling at the tournaments.
The motivational aspect of travel tournaments is critical for teams, but it does not tell the entire story. Milton should promote more travel competitions because it also encourages interaction with a wealth of diverse strategies and perspectives. Though great minds allegedly think alike, different environments often inspire varying but equally valid approaches to the same problem. The December debate topic of “pharmaceutical price controls” provides an excellent example of this diversity. While teams from the local Massachusetts circuit made arguments regarding the long-term impacts of price controls, teams at an invitational tournament in Atlanta focused more on the short-term urgency, specifically the importance of saving lives now rather than deferring the problem of high drug prices to the future. We can, again, see the diverse environment travel-tournaments create in recent discussion of the January topic: federal debt and economic growth. Traveling outside our local circuit enabled us to discover and debate against innovative and well-constructed arguments. By the same token, Zayaruzny went on to highlight that robotics tournaments involve “lots of interaction between teams” and that “you see little details or changes to some parts that can result in major improvements to overall design.” In the same fashion as Debate, the Robotics Team draws inspiration from the multitude of ideas and approaches encountered at tournaments.
Accumulating a wide range of experience has proven critical to a team’s success on more expansive state-level and national-level stages. Therefore, our administration should promote more travel tournaments and experiences since they motivate teams to work efficiently and because traveling provides opportunities for teams to witness a great variety of valuable and creative perspectives from which they can draw inspiration. This growth-oriented philosophy is not limited to forensics or robotics; it can be applied to MUN, the Math Team, and a wide range of other teams as well.
Image Courtesy of Google Images