Ray of Hope: An unconfident teenage boy finds himself with the help of an unlikely friend by Mark Hamilton

Author:Mark Hamilton [Hamilton, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-11T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

Baseball & Debate Tournaments

Ray played on a travel team in baseball, but he also found time to play on the school team and made it his priority while the school played. He was just one of a number of pitchers we had. Carlos and Chad Jones pitched. Even Harrison and Taylor (a sophomore playing up) pitched some. The problem with our pitching was that we had no real ace pitcher. Just a bunch of really good pitchers. So, it was pitching by assembly.

Once again, the Bruins were tough as was Dickerson. However, in our conference it was a down year for baseball talent. Despite having no pitching ace, we still had overall the best pitching in the conference. So, we easily won the conference and headed into the District. There it went to a round robin tournament. Two losses meant you were out. We lost twice right off the bat and were out of the tournament.

During December, Ray began to miss a lot of scheduled debate meetings and so Mr. Harris started relying on me more. It was not like he did with Ray. Ray almost ran it. But I pitched in and definitely was the next in charge, just no title.

At the end of the year the debate club entered into the Conference Debate Tournament. The tournament was a round robin tournament much like baseball, but it was single elimination. One loss and you were out. Each school had two teams of two students and then one team of just one student. In addition, a student could only be used once with exception of the one on one debate. Mr. Harris felt Ray and I were among the best, so he put both of us together on one team. Then hoped we could win the single one on one. Ray made the decision to switch off with me as to who did the single debate, then flipped a coin to see who would represent us first. He won this coin flip and was up first.

There was no seeding. Who you debated first was strictly random. In our case we played the Bruins first. Ray and I did our part by winning our doubles and we would not lose the entire tournament. Unfortunately, our other doubles team never won. So each team we faced always came down to Ray or myself winning the one on one debate as the tiebreaker. This carried us all the way to the finals. Ray won his, then I won mine. In the finals, we faced Eastwood. Ray was representing us in the finals. And it was determined by the judges that he lost.

It was the one thing Ray had warned me about. It’s not like football or basketball or even baseball where whomever scores the most wins and its obvious. In debate, it’s up to the judges. His motto was to win convincedly and never leave it up to the judges. Of course, sometimes that was not possible.

Overall, the Debate Team performed well for the first time doing this sort of thing.

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