When senior Yasmine Ramachandra qualified for the Tournament of Champions (TOC) in Public Forum Debate, she fist-bumped senior Sam Korsky, her partner.

Ramachandra said she was shocked and proud when she realized they had qualified.

“We never expected to qualify, so it just felt amazing,” Korsky said.

Sophomore year, Korsky said that he would often go without wins at local debate tournaments against 20 teams that “were not particularly good.”

“After two years and after all the practice, all the research and getting used to the activity, [Yasmine and I] kind of made a major milestone and kind of separated ourselves by qualifying for the Tournament of Champions,” Korsky said.

According to Korsky, the TOC is the most prestigious high school tournament of Public Forum Debate.

Director of debate Michael Greenstein said that for both Public Forum and Policy debate, about 68 to 72 teams out of thousands qualify for the TOC every year.

Debate tournaments begin with pre-elimination rounds, of which a team must win a majority to “break,” or qualify, to the elimination portion of the tournament. A bid round, the round a team must win to earn a bid, or half a qualification to the TOC, is predetermined and can be anywhere from the first elimination round to the finals of the tournament, depending on the difficulty of the competition.

Greenstein said that in the past two years, the Glenbrook North Policy program qualified five teams to the TOC, which is the national record for the most teams qualified in a single year by one school.

Greenstein said he thinks Ramachandra and Korsky are the first Public Forum team from GBN to qualify for the TOC.

“We really didn’t have a [competitive] Public Forum team for a while,” Korsky said.

Last year, Korsky, Ramachandra and two alumni, Matthew Bondy (‘14) and Maya Simkin (‘14), joined the Public Forum class.

“We were all interested in being competitive,” Korsky said.

There are three different types of debate in which GBN students compete: Policy, Public Forum and Lincoln-Douglas. Policy and Public Forum topics include various domestic and international issues. In Policy, teams are aware whether or not they are defending or opposing a topic before the round, whereas in Public Forum, teams flip a coin at the beginning of the debate in order to decide whether they are arguing for or arguing against the topic of focus.

Korsky said Public Forum, unlike Policy, which has the same topic the whole year, argues a different topic each month.

“Now [Public Forum] is something that GBN is actually competitive in,” said Korsky. “It’s something where GBN is a somewhat recognizable name.”