On March 13th, seven schools came to Lafayette for one of the last warm-ups before nationals.  Lafayette was joined by the Ohio State University, Otterbein College, Ithaca College, Plymouth State University, the University of Pennsylvania and the national champions, Western Kentucky University for a six round NFA-LD tournament held in Pardee Hall.

After the preliminary rounds, the tournament seeded 8 debaters into the single-elimination quarterfinal round.  Of those eight, FOUR were Lafayette debaters.  Since it is NCAA tournament season, I’ll run down the bracket for you:

Quarterfinals Semifinals Finals
(1) Western Kentucky – Frank Murdock
(8) Ohio State – Deion Hawkins
(1) WKU – Murdock
(4) LAF – Garg
(4) Lafayette – Teevrat Garg
(5) Lafayette – Sam Derrick
(4) LAF – Garg
(7) OTT – Hansen
(3) Lafayette – Mohan Ru
(6) Lafayette – Ryan Benjamin
(3) LAF – Ru
(7) OTT – Hansen
(2) Ohio State – Alex Liber
(7) Otterbein – Jes Hansen

In the final round, Teevrat Garg (senior) defeated Otterbein’s Jes Hansen on a 3-0 decision.  Teevrat affirmed the topic “the United States Federal Government should substantially reform domestic transportation infrastructure” by arguing that the US should build a “thruport” in Chicago to better facilitate the intermodal transfer of truck and rail shipments.  His argument hinges on the economic and safety ramifications included in improving the efficiency of freight transportation in the United States.

Lafayette has two more tune ups before travelling to Athens, Ohio for nationals at Ohio University.