Lessons in Losses (You Can’t Win ‘Em All)
A few weeks ago, I earned 1st place in the Arkansas Tech University’s debate, speech, and ‘civil discourse’ professional division categories.
Jessica got me that tie.
The week before that, UCLA mock trial took 1st place at the University of Texas at Austin’s undergraduate tournament.
Those are the sort of wins that you like to publicize, so, there, I’ve publicized ‘em. But let’s switch gears and bring up the losses.
I lost in the semifinal round of a different adult debate tournament immediately before that win. A different UCLA squad lost a close round to Rhodes College at the Texas tournament. No person and no program wins all the time.
Ain’t No Such Thing As Perfect
Usain Bolt lost three races at the Olympics and World Championships and an estimated 15-20 times in career-level contests. Simone Biles took silver at the 2024 Paris Olympics and fifth in the balance beam final. Michael Jordan lost 366 regular season and 60 playoff games. Magnus Carlsen has lost chess games nearly 50 times. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt lost in a Senate primary.
Nobody’s THAT good at debate, mock trial, Toastmasters, or anything else. Everybody’s beatable in front of the right crowd at the right time of day. So am I.
In speech rounds (high school and the Professional Speech and Debate Association), I ranked in the top two out of seven roughly 90% of the time, but ranked 1st outright in only 67% of rounds.
In mock trial (American Mock Trial Association), I won two national championships, but only won 67% (again) across all four years.
As a debater, I have a 81% win rate.
As a mock trial coach, my students have also won 81% of their rounds; as a speech coach, my students have a 89% entry-to-award ratio in the 2025-2026 season.
These are all good numbers and I’m proud of them. But, yes, I can lose. And I do. That’s a good thing. If I didn’t, I would have a much harder time relating to seminal experiences of losing and learning.
A coach/friend of mine shared this with me: “My students, like myself at their age, really struggle to see the difference between their loss of a round and their loss of personal quality or value. In debate, you win or lose with your ideas, which is inherently intimate and can be challenging for them to separate.”
To keep myself accountable as a learner and communicator, and to give students like those some learning opportunities and perspective, I’m going to update this blog post every time I don’t win a professional debate round.
Since I have a goal of winning at least five more national championships in IPDA (bringing my total to seven, since the current record is six), I expect this post to get pretty long.
The Adult Debate League
IPDA (the International Public Debate Association), unlike other debater formats, has inconsistency and randomness baked in its bones.
The topics are never tested for ‘balance’ (giving equal ground to the affirmative and negative side); you can have obviously skewed topics like “We should encourage more civic engagement.”
The judges never disclose their preferences before a round or verbally explain their decisions after rounds.
There is no mechanism to verify the evidence provided by either side, which means that power-tagging (claiming your source says something more than what it does) is common, and debaters are mostly bound by an honor system that some ignore.
Yeah, it’s tough. But it also represents how real world communication goes. You might find yourself having to defend unpopular positions in front of people with unclear expectations. You might get frustrated by people voting on feelings over facts, or not double-checking claims made by politicians or pundits.
But becoming resilient in the face of this—and overcoming it—is key to building real confidence.
How I’ve Lost
There are four ways I can fail to earn my judge’s ballot:
My striking (when my opponent and I determine which of our five options to debate, did I let a bad topic for my side slip through?)
My substance (was my content persuasive?)
My structure (did I order/express my content clearly?)
My style (did my vocal inflection, body language, and rhetorical choices enhance or detract from my performance?).
I’ll evaluate each of those factors below. Some of this is from judges’ comments. Most is from my own reflection.
Affirming “Stephen King had a greater cultural impact than Alfred Hitchcock.”
Striking: I don’t love this topic for the affirmative. Cultural impact is hard to measure; we don’t live in a monoculture. My opponent rightly ran a comparing “apples and oranges” argument that our judge found persuasive. In retrospect, while I chose the topic because I’m a huge Stephen King fan, sometimes passion about the source material isn’t enough.
Substance: I was completely wrong on one point (I thought Stephen King was honored with a Congressional medal; that was Stephen Hawking). I also wasn’t clear enough on my narrative that King has had a greater impact across genres, nationalities, and mediums; I should have made those ideas my three arguments.
Structure: I wasn’t particularly clear in my closing speech when responding to my opponent’s key voting issues.
Style: I was a little aggressive in cross when challenging evidence that I didn’t think supported my opponent’s claims.
Affirming “Definitional debates are more harmful than beneficial.”
Striking: I also don’t love this topic for the affirmative, but it came down to this and a silly topic about if Waffle House employees would defeat other restaurant employees in a fight. The problem is that definitional debates, while annoying, are often helpful in the real world—they determine Supreme Court precedent, key terms of business agreements, relationship statuses, and more. I don’t think I should have picked this.
Substance: I tried to make the round about definitional arguments in an IPDA setting. I had four points, but the main thesis was that debating definitions when we have such little time to speak saps the round of its educational value and reduces discussions of substance. This was fine.
Structure: I didn’t allocate my time well this round, making strategic concessions on a few of my own points. I think I stretched myself too thin by arguing about too many nuances in IPDA definitional debates.
Style: This is where I lost the round. Instead of taking things slow and easy, I incorrectly intuited that two of my three judges were comfortable with a faster, more aggressive style. IPDA normally has two or three points; I blasted through four of them. If I had constrained myself to the best two out of those four, I would have had more time to refute my opponent. This round was winnable at the beginning, but I lost it by going for too many ideas.
Negating “Price caps are a beneficial economic tool.”
Striking: The topic’s phrasing slightly favors the affirmative side, since the common understanding of tools is that they do something, but don’t need to do everything. If the affirmative can show there are niche situations where capping the price of something like insulin is useful, then they win. My opponent understood and took advantage of this; I underestimated him.
Substance: I had plenty of evidence that price caps disrupt the supply/demand curve and was well-prepared to refute my opponent’s stock arguments. The problem was I didn’t engage on the framing level enough. I needed to argue that, if a tool only works in a couple instances even though it’s designed to work for far more instances, you would return it to the store; for example, if you had a hammer that was supposed to work on all standard nails but it broke all types of nails but one, it would not be beneficial. A lot of IPDA is about the common understanding of metaphors, and I didn’t do enough of this.
Structure: No issues.
Style: No real issues, but since this was a Halloween tournament and my opponent was costumed, I should have had at least a little costume instead of a standard blazer and slacks. No need to lose the vibe check.
Affirming “Convicted felons should not get bail.”
Striking: This is a tough but winnable affirmative. The negative will argue that this is an extreme position; there are some felons who are not active and present dangers (some white-collar or nonviolent criminals, for instance). The affirmative has to argue that the overall threats to society from repeat offenders outweigh the edge cases, and that those individuals can always appeal. I generally don’t like being on the ‘extreme/absolute’ side of a topic.
Substance: My opponent had good evidence about prison and jail overcrowding that I couldn’t contend with. I had more knowledge about the legal protections afforded to the accused, even without bail. The problem is how I chose to scope the round, which was ‘convicted VIOLENT felons.’ My opponent ran an abuse case against that scoping, and the judge voted on it. The problem is that, in the IPDA constitution, a definition/scoping challenge is not resolved by voting down the allegedly abusive team; you simply use the counter-definitions instead. I did not make that clear (“Even if you think it is abusive, I can still win under the ‘convicted nonviolent felons’ framing”).
Structure: No problems.
Style: When my opponent came in hot with the abuse case, I think I lost some momentum and tried to play it off too cool instead of fighting fire with fire. If I had been clear that this case was not abusive, that even if it was abusive that’s not an automatic win for either side, and that my opponent was trying to make that the issue in the round instead of debating substance, I think I would have won.
Negating “The Barbie Movie (2023) oversimplified feminism.”
Striking: This is Affirmative-skewed because, yes, almost every non-documentary film will simplify a huge cultural movement. My strategy was to draw the judges’ attention to the surprising amount of depth and deconstruction of capitalism and masculinity inside the film. I think I did as well as I could there, but I didn’t have enough to refute the lack of meaningful intersectionality in the film (a big part of feminism’s third and fourth waves).
Substance: I pushed a lot on ‘simplified’ versus ‘oversimplified,’ but I think I missed the key question. If my opponent was unable to give me an example of a film that did NOT ‘oversimplify’ a cultural movement, that would mean my opponent was holding media to an impossible, unreasonable standard. Instead, I kept pushing him on which wave of feminism he claimed was being oversimplified—fine, but not the knock out blow. I also missed a real opportunity to call out a piece of misquoted evidence; he claimed that America Ferrera and the whole cast had disavowed the film, which is plainly false. I thought the judges recognized that, but didn’t spend enough time attacking it.
Structure: I was a little in my head this round because of a big work call happening literally the minute after the round ended. It missed with my time allocation; I finished around 20 seconds early.
Style: I was charismatic and fun. No issues.
Negating “Peaceful revolutions are better than violent revolutions in the long term.”
Striking: This claim is probably true, so it’s Affirmative-tilted. There’s plenty of evidence that peaceful revolutions are becoming less effective, but that doesn’t mean the alternative is more effective. Still, a winnable topic with enough pushing for the Affirmative to provide examples of purely peaceful revolutions (spoiler alert — most examples you can think of had ongoing, concurrent violence).
Substance: I found a lot of good evidence here and was prepared to beat my opponent’s examples one at a time. No issues.
Structure: I think I could have labeled my final voting issues more clearly, demonstrating that: 1 - Peaceful revolutions don’t work, 2 - If they don’t work, there’s no long term success, 3 - Violence is necessary to create peaceful conditions. I was a bit too glib in how I phrased this in round (for a reason I’ll explain below).
Style: This is a tricky one. I knew going into this round that, win or lose, I was guaranteed to advance to elimination rounds in first place. So my strategy was to be as likable as possible, so I would also be guaranteed the first place speaker award. I spent a lot of time complimenting my opponent (sincerely; he deserves it — great guy) to help make the judge feel comfortable giving us both perfect speaker points, and ended my final speech early instead of going scorched earth with a demand to vote for me. So was this a round-winning performance? No. But I was going for a different win condition.
Some people sometimes ask me if I thought I deserved to win a round I didn’t.
My answer is always NO; that way of thinking lies madness. Our job is to convince the person in front of us to sign the ballot in our favor while not breaching academic, interpersonal, or ethical codes of conduct. If I didn’t get the win, then I didn’t do my job.
If you want to follow along as I keep adding to this list of losses, stick around on the blog and subscribe to my channel. I take on a small cohort of clients every month who want to start speaking like a national champion.
If you want something that pairs well with this message, read Love for Imperfect Things by Haemin Sunim. It is a gentle reminder that worth is not tied to performance, and that flaws are part of being human. I go back to it often.
You can also look to John Wooden. His writing on discipline, character, and process has shaped how I teach and compete. He cared more about daily improvement than scoreboard results. That mindset carries you a lot farther than any trophy.
Thanks for reading. I hope the wins help you. I hope the losses help you even more.
