2023 Harvard University Tournament

41 VDA Students Win Top Honours at Harvard Debate Tournament

Vancouver Debate Academy finished with 41 students winning top honours at this year’s Harvard Debate Tournament, including an incredible 20 team trophies and 7 speaker awards. At the top of the pack were varsity debaters Mia Liu & Claire Zhong and Andrew Zhang & Johnson Wu, who finished in the top 16 teams in the country and earned Gold Bids to the elite Tournament of Champions in April. Winning a JV Championship in the International Division were the team of Aella Gong & Erwin Wang, while debaters Mary Tian and Victor Zhang were top speakers of the online Varsity and Novice divisions, respectively.

Finishing in the top 4 of their divisions were the teams of Aiden Han & Vivian Lang (Varsity Online) and Fredrick Li & Nikki Zheng (JV), while Adam Han & Eric Ma (Varsity Online), Annie Zhao & Serena Zhang (JV), and Yuanze Toth & Zena Su (JV International) finished in the top 8. On the individual side, Mia Liu won 6th speaker, Claire Zhong 7th, and Johnson Wu 10th in Varsity, while Adam Han finished 7th in Varsity Online, and Emily Qian was 6th in Novice Online.

VDA wins big at elite invitation-only Harvard tournament (only top international teams from Canada, China, and Vietnam invited for the Round Robin styleGeneral Definition: How one delivers speeches, including techniques like tone, pitch, rate, facial expressions, gestures, volume, eye contact, word choice, etc. • Public Forum: Commonly used. In PF, style is typically evaluated as part of a debater's "Speaker Points", although it may influence the judge's perception of their arguments as well. • World Schools Debate: Commonly used. In WSD, this tourmament) – VDA teams of Adam Han & Eric Ma and Johnson Wu & Andrew Zhang were invited
2. Adam Han & Eric Ma finish 3rd with near perfect record
3. Adam Han wins 3rd speaker of the tournament

This year’s Harvard tournament was attended by over 2,000 of the best Public Forum debaters from around the world, and every student should be incredibly proud of their amazing accomplishments. Congratulations to everyone on an outstanding team effort!