The accidental debater: Chesterton senior Rowan Hartley had no intention of trying speech and debate, went to a tournament as a favor to a friend and became hooked

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Back when Chesterton senior Rowan Hartley was a freshman, her phone pinged and she read a text from a friend asking a favor of her.
For no other reason than to help a friend in need, Hartley responded in the affirmative. Little did she know it would open a door to a world she finds fascinating, one for which she is ideally suited: speech and debate.
“Someone that was on the team was having some partner issues with Public Forum, and they asked me to come step in and be their partner for a tournament,” Hartley said. “My friend just messaged me: ‘Can you please help me?’ And so I did it for that one time and I'm like, ‘You know, this is actually kind of cool.’ But then I didn't do it the rest of that season because she didn't need me anymore.”
Hartley joined as a sophomore and has stuck with it.
After a year and change into it, she supplemented her debate tournaments with speech competitions, mainly to help her in debate.
“I've seen that I've especially within my debate skills that even just doing one or maybe picking up a second speech event can just bring my debate skills and my debate performance significantly up just by being able to articulate myself more effectively than others, and just by being able to convey all of the things that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to get in debate,” she said. “It’s smart to mingle them, for sure.”
In using speech to polish her debate skills, Hartley became so skilled at it that she and partner Lincoln Rhoda placed fourth at the speech sectionals in the Duo Interpretation category a few weekends ago.
Hartley’s a debater at heart, though, and it’s the Student Congress category that she finds most fascinating.
The students basically role play as members of Congress, collaborating to come up with bills that are “for the common good.” The student who in the eyes of the judges does the best job of working well with others, showing knowledge, etc. wins first place, so when Hartley competed she was vying against her collaborators for first place.
The students work together on legislation after being given topics. One example: They debated the pros and cons of passing legislation that would ban the SAT. Hartley said she went into thinking she would be in favor of that but was persuaded to take the other side.
“All I would get in politics being a young person is what I'm hearing at the dinner table or whatever news channel my parents might have on,” Hartley said. “But being able to be in speech and debate, you get to learn about all these things where it's like, ‘Oh, I guess this is really interesting.’ Like, how are tax dollars truly used and how do carbon taxes really affect businesses? On the surface, you think, ‘Oh, this carbon tax, isn't that something that I would want being an American citizen? We need to pay for all of these things.’ But then you look at it from the business side and you’re like, ‘Wow, these companies could be harmed,’ and it actually is a lot more interesting than I thought.”
Hartley said she considers herself “lucky,” for having received that text from a friend a few years ago and is “100%” certain many students walking the Chesterton High halls who never would see themselves as members of the speech and debate team would love it if they tried it.