Smith’s Hill High School now has the trophy to prove how much its students love winning an argument.
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On Friday the Wollongong school was crowned the Year 11 and 12 NSW Premier’s Debating Challenge winners after they defeated North Sydney Girls High School.
The title victory was the fifth success for the school in the last 10 years.
The four-person team of Arin Tornyi-Aydin, Henry Kocatekin, Elinor Stephenson and Tommy Polden were coached by teacher Kerry Doyle.
Smith’s Hill High School was set a difficult task having to argue against the topic – ‘’That we should have quotas for women in parliament’’.
Ms Doyle said while it was a ‘’tough call’’ the team managed to convince the judges that ‘’women want to get there on their own efforts’’.
Smith’s Hill High School final speaker Elinor Stephenson was confident the team had won the day before she delivered its closing arguments.
‘’I was nervous but I really felt my team had the more substantive case and that a lot of our opposition’s argument was just rhetoric,’’ she said.
However first speaker Arin Tornyi-Aydin had one of the harder jobs of the day as a male arguing against giving women equal representation through quotas.
‘’It was tough I was conscious of being a male speaker and so I had to make sure I didn’t sound like a chauvinist,’’ he said.
Ms Doyle said members of the team have been debating together in various forms since Year 7.
Three members of the debating team are debaters and the fourth person is the team advisor, assisting the speakers with rebuttal and the consistent delivery of the team's argument.
