The campaign started in early January when Colin Etnire ('12), Ian Mahmud ('12), Ben Smith ('13), and Virginia Flatow ('13) trekked to bitterly cold Williams College. Mahmud and Etnire debated in their first round less than 24 hours after returning to the U.S. from the World Championships in Turkey. However, the 20+ hour journey home and the 4 hour car drive to the corner of Massachusetts weren't enough to set the duo off their game, as they cruised through 5 in-rounds and an out round (all against Ivy League schools) to earn a spot in the finals against longtime rivals Harvard LR. Heavy underdogs to the second-ranked team in the nation, the Batesies played to their strengths and proposed a broad, philosophical debate: "This house believes western liberal democracies should include positive rights in their constitutions." Harvard's strategy of engaging technical rather than philosophical issues backfired, and the panel awarded a 5-4 decision to the upstarts from Bates, shocking the debate world. Etnire was named the tournament's top speaker with Mahmud not far behind at 5^th.

Continuing Bates' dominance at the tournament, the Flatow and Smith made the novice finals against, similarly, a more highly regarded Yale team. The Batesies brilliantly threw Yale out of its comfort zone by proposing the absurdist case "It's 1962, you're JFK, and you have technology to secretly drop a thousand velociraptors on Soviet Russia. Do you do it?" and Yale chose no. Flatow and Smith debated at the top of their game and took the novice championship on a 2-1 call. Smith was then named the tournament's 4^th place novice speaker.

Just one week later, at Dartmouth College, Etnire and Mahmud made yet another deep run. Their luck was poor early on, however, drawing a hybrid team composed of two of the top 10 debaters in the nation for the first round. After narrowly losing that match up, the Batesies rallied to 4 straight wins and found themselves in the quarterfinals, squaring off against the hybrid juggernaut once again. Unfortunately, although it was an excellent debate, Etnire and Mahmud couldn't quite find their form of the previous weekend and were eliminated. Meanwhile, first-year Eric Devaux picked up the BQDC's second novice speaker award of the season, sneaking into the top 10 novice speakers.

Etnire then partnered up with Smith for Princeton's annual Adlai Stevenson debates. Although the young pair was composed of a sophomore and a freshman, and had to deal with unusual non-debate related adversity, they made an improbable run and reached a bubble round against a team then ranked first in the nation. Bates lost the round, but it turned a lot of heads on the circuit when the ballots came back showing they had lost by the smallest margin possible.

After heartbreaking misses at both the varsity and novice level at Stanford, the BQDC showed its depth in early March at Providence College. The freshmen duos of Devaux/Flatow and Djang/Smith both easily made it to novice out-rounds, where they were knocked out in semi-finals. Smith took home 4^th place novice speaker, Devaux 5^th,and Djang 8^th. On the varsity level, Etnire and Mahmud finished at 4-1 and the 9^th place varsity team, less than 1 speaker point away from breaking.

Taking a break from the northern circuit (and his usual partnership), Etnire flew down to a blazing hot College of William and Mary in the middle of March to partner with junior Ali Boyle from Johns Hopkins. Although the pair had never met before, they immediately clicked and racked up 4 consecutive wins to start the tournament. After a puzzling fifth-round loss, they faced MIT A in quarterfinals, and fell in a close round against the much celebrated team. However, Etnire took home with him the 6^th place varsity team, 9^th place varsity speaker (Etnire), and enduring memories of the taste of the Cheese Shop's sandwiches.

Although Etnire and Mahmud's APDA regular season was over by April, Seniors Ariela Silberstein and Matt Marienthal paired together and were accompanied by Smith and Djang to the University of Chicago tournament two weekends later. The freshmen got off to an extremely hot start, winning their first 3 rounds, and then easily beat Duke in the semi-finals to face Stanford for the championship. Although they lost in a split-decision, it was by far the highest profile novice final Brooks Quimby has been involved in for over a year, and they took home a pair of speaker awards too: Djang finished 7^th, Smith 8^th.

That same weekend, Mahmud and Etnire made a 1200 mile round trip drive to upstate New York to participate in the prestigious and exclusive HWS/IDEA round robin. 8 different countries on 5 continents were represented by the 16 teams in attendance, and the judging panel included former Worlds finalists and the current WUDC Chief Adjudicator. The pair finished in the middle of a field that included Yale, Cambridge, Rhodes (South Africa), Queens (Canada), Trinity College Dublin, Cornell, Swarthmore, and defending world champs, the University of Sydney.

In spite of impending exams, Silberstein and Etnire flew out to Denver, Colorado, for the USU National Championships. The 127-team field was on the whole unspectacular but extremely strong at the top end, and the pair rode the top rooms in the tournament the entire way to out-rounds. Easily passing through the octo-final round, and surviving a bit of a scare in the quarter-finals, the pair (who had never debated together competitively before) found themselves across the bench from Stanford A, reigning Worlds semi-finalists and graduate students who were collectively more than a decade older than the young Batesies. Although Silberstein and Etnire couldn't pull off one last upset, their run helped cement the BQDC's reputation even on the West Coast of the US. Their run to the semi finals is the deepest run in a national championship for a Bates team in the modern era.

            Although not quite back to the powerhouse level of Yale or Harvard, the young and talented Brooks Quimby Debate Council looks like it's on the verge of breaking through. Check back in September to see if the team picks up at Johns Hopkins where it left off this season.

Varsity Tournament Victories - Vermont, Williams College (Mahmud/Etnire)

Novice Tournament Victories - Williams College (Smith/Flatow)

Varsity Outround appearances - USU National Championships (Silberstein/Etnire), Vermont (Wong/Lupu), William and Mary II (Etnire/Boyle*), Vermont, Williams, Dartmouth (Etnire/Mahmud).

Novice Outround appearances - Williams (Smith/Flatow), PC (Flatow/Devaux), PC (Djang/Smith), UChicago (Djang/Smith).

*Ali Boyle, a hybrid partner from Johns Hopkins

INDIVIDUAL AWARDS

-Colin Etnire: 3rd place speaker (Vermont), top speaker (Williams), 9th speaker (William and Mary)

-Ian Mahmud: 5th place speaker (Williams)

-Ben Smith:4th place novice (Williams), 5th novice (PC), 8th novice (Stanford), 8th novice (UChicago)

-Cat Djang: 7th place novice (UChicago), 8th novice (PC) 

-Eric Devaux: 6th place novice (PC), 10th novice (Dartmouth)

WORLDS

Bates College WUDC Ranking - 25^th in the world, 7^th in the nation, 1^st amongst schools without graduate students

Koc 2010 performance - 40 points total from 3 teams, up from 14 on 1 last year.

NOTABLE ACHEIVEMENTS:

-Ariela Silberstein and Colin Etnire made it all the way to the semi-finals of the USU National Championships in Denver, the deepest run of any Bates pair in modern history.

-Bates won the largest parliamentary debate tournament in its history when it won Vermont.

-Etnire and Ian Mahmud were invited to the prestigious and exclusive HWS/IDEA round robin, where they finished in the middle of a 16 team field that included Cambridge, Yale, Cornell, Swarthmore, and defending world champions Sydney. 8 different countries and 5 continents were represented by the 16 teams.

-Etnire is one of only 4 sophomores in the nation to win a top speaker award in the last two years

-Etnire and Mahmud had an absurdly long string of near-misses, getting into bubble rounds at Smith College, Yale, Oxford, NYU, Stanford, Providence College, and Boston University and failing to advance each time. Making it all the more painful was that they won 2 of those rounds but didn't manage to accrue enough points in the process to break. Etnire also barely missed the break with freshman Ben Smith at Princeton

APDA RANKINGS

Bates College Ranking - 22^nd in the nation

Top team ranking - 46^th (Mahmud/Etnire)

Top Speaker ranking -51^st (Etnire)

Novice Rankings - 46^th (Smith), 70^th (Devaux), 86^th (Djang)

BROOKS QUIMBY INTRAMURAL RESULTS

Novice Tournament:

-Champions: Cat Djang and Eric Devaux  (on a 6-1 decision)

-Runners up: Ben Smith and Spencer Collett

-Top Speaker: Cat Djang

BP Pro-Am Tournament:

-Champions: Andrew Wong and Spencer Collett

-Runners up: Ian Mahmud and Kevin McCandlish

-Finalists: Rachel Kurzius and Sam Schleipman, Ben Smith and Mandera

-Top Varsity Speaker: Ian Mahmud

-Top Novice Speaker: Kate Fetrow and Ben Smith (Tie)

-Most improved Varsity: Sam Schleipman

-Most improved Novice: Kevin McCandlish

NOTES

-Bates will host its tournament on January 22^nd and 23^rd, 2011, and it will be not be opposed by any other tournaments. The tournament will be preceded by our annual public debate, which will feature one or both of traditional partners Yale or Harvard, with a possibility of expanding it to a four-team debate to be determined later.

-The team will attend the same set of far-away tournaments as last year (Oxford, Cambridge, and Stanford), but will also likely tack on one extra English tournament to the schedule. We also plan on once again sending a full slate to the world championships, which this year take place in Gaborone, Botswana.

The debaters enjoyed soaking up lots of sun, eating Pinkberry, sightseeing in San Francisico - and debating, of course. Competing against a pool of 48 teams (including 39 novices), the BQDC was faced with intense competition. After five full rounds of debate, Djang and Smith finished as the 5th place novice team, just shy of the novice break to semi-finals. Smith also scored 8th novice speaker at the tournament.

In the novice bracket, Yale HT's Aaron Hakim and David Trinh overtook Stanford HP's Nicholas Hernandez and Emma Pierson on a 4-1 in the novice final round on a 4-1 decision, debating the resolution, "This house would remove veto power from permanent members of the UN Security Council." The top novice speaker was Yale's Robert Colonel.

In the varsity bracket, eight teams broke to quarterfinals. The final round pitted MIT's Adam Goldstein and Peter McKee against Yale's Alyssa Bilinski and Kate Falkenstein. They debated whether a large donor to a hypothetical liberal arts college ought to have the power to censor objectionable religious art. On a 4-3 decision, the judging panel gave the round to Yale's Alyssa Blinski and Kate Falkenstein. The top varsity speaker was Yale's Grant May.

Turnout at the 2010 MLK Day debate was over 150, and many members of the audience supplemented the insights of the four debaters through a incisive floor speeches and question.

The annual MLK Day debate has its roots in the relationship between Martin Luther King, Jr. and his mentor, Benjamin Mays, a Bates graduate, Brooks Quimby alumnus and former president of Morehouse College.

The team's strong performance at Worlds moved the Brooks Quimby Debate Council up to the 25th best team in the world, and America's number 7. Additionally, Bates is far and away the top ranked institution in the world that does not have the benefit of graduate students, who are allowed to compete at worlds. Motions at the competition included, "This house would partition Sudan," "This house would allow terminally ill patients to choose drugs that have not completed testing," and "This house would hold communities responsible for complicity in honor killings." Other American teams fared quite well at the tournament, with almost a quarter of the breaking teams, and Harvard A team reaching the finals.

Next year's Worlds Debating Championships will take the team further from home. For only the third time in the history of the Worlds Debating Championships, the 2011 competition will take place on the African continent, at the University of Botswana in Gaborone.