Orange Coast College Hosts Debate Contest

More than 70 community college debate teams from across the country have come to town this week to try to unseat national champion Orange Coast College, winner of the crown for the last three years.

About 600 students are competing in the contest, hosted by Orange Coast College at the Red Lion Inn on Bristol Street.

The students compete in 16 speaking categories, including impromptu, speech to entertain, persuasion, prose and interpretive theater.

Judges may focus on the content of a speech, whether a student uses good grammar, how much emotion the speech evokes or other characteristics of the speaker, said Frank Tourangeau, speech team coach and teacher at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Ill.

In a second-story hotel room, six students nervously awaited their turn to deliver speeches based on one word the judge handed each of them.

Sukhminder Arora, 18, quoted Thoreau, William T. Golding, John Locke and Adam Smith in his five-minute speech on individualism. He also recalled a scene from the television show “Candid Camera” to bring a little humor into the delivery.

“Communication is so important. It’s important in how you relate to other people and how you live,” said Arora, who attends Pierce College in Los Angeles.

Orange Coast College student Christina Bagdonas, 22, is competing in her second national tournament and said she has spent 15 to 20 hours a week preparing for the event.

“I read everything and I watch CNN like a fiend,” Bagdonas said.

In her speech about materialism, Bagdonas told the audience how a prisoner of war in the Persian Gulf War was stripped of his belongings, including his wedding ring. That, said Bagdonas, gave the prisoner a new set of values which put his life and those he loved above all the material good he had acquired.