Seniors Ben Dean and Holden Choi faced the possibility of elimination from the Urban Debate National Competition on four different occasions and survived each time. After defeating a team from Baltimore City College in the final round, Dean and Choi were crowned national champions.

Dean and Choi, members of Grady’s policy debate team, competed along with more than 150 high school students on April 14-15 at the campus of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Grady students began attending the annual tournament four years ago, but had never won until this year.

Rather than representing Grady, Dean and Choi travelled to Washington with two students from North Atlanta High School as representatives from the city of Atlanta. The competition was reserved only for urban schools in an effort to encourage debate to spread to more cities and include a more socioeconomically and racially diverse population.

The students arrived at Georgetown on April 12 to attend several social events hosted by the tournament before competition rounds began. During a dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel, Dean and Choi were able to listen to speeches by several prominent individuals such as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Also, all students were invited for a day at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, reflecting this year’s high school policy debate resolution: The U.S. government should substantially increase its exploration and/or development of space beyond the Earth’s mesosphere.

Dean and Choi competed in five preliminary rounds on Saturday. After each round, three judges each cast a ballot to decide the victor of the round.

The competition was unusual, Dean said, because students were not told of their results after each round. Instead, they were forced to wait until the end of the day to learn whether they had finished in the top 16 teams and moved on to the elimination rounds. The team, however, had nothing to worry about since they had won every ballot and was seeded first after its first five rounds.

The elimination rounds began on Sunday. A loss in any round would mean the end of the competition for Dean and Choi. The duo began the day competing against a team from San Francisco. Debate coach Lisa Willoughby called the round “an easy victory.” The team won its second, third and fourth elimination rounds against teams from New York, Chicago and Maryland. Throughout the entire competition, the team lost only a single ballot.

Willoughby said Dean and Choi made a very interesting and clever argument during their final round.

“Ben and Holden said that we should increase exploration of space by sending self-contained units of marines to space,” Willoughby said. “The other team said this would lead to climate change. We argued that climate change is good since it would increase the temperature and prevent the disaster of an oncoming ice age.”

Willoughby said the opposing team had no response after Dean and Choi made this argument. Dean said the judges told them after the round that Grady had won on this argument.

“The judges said that the argument we won on was ‘smart silliness’ because it was strategic to make in the round though it is obviously silly in the real world,” Dean said.