The Palo Alto High School debate team is welcoming a new coach while dealing with the departures of its past Lincoln-Douglas debate coaches.

Rising Stanford freshman Alex Kennedy will be the new assistant Lincoln-Douglas debate coach. Nadia Arid, Paly’s head Lincoln-Douglas debate coach, contacted her about coaching the team this year after Kennedy chose to attend Stanford. 

Kennedy graduated from The College Preparatory School in Oakland, CA, where she was on the Lincoln-Douglas debate team for four years, competing mostly on the national circuit. Kennedy qualified for the Tournament of Champions twice and won top 10 speaker awards in numerous tournaments, according to Paly’s debate blog. 

Kennedy feels optimistic about this year’s team’s prospects.

“I think Palo Alto is a consistently successful program because the kids are bright, talented and hardworking,” Kennedy said. “This year’s team is no different and I think it has the potential for great success this year. I’m really looking forward to helping all of them realize that potential this year.”

The team is excited to have Kennedy coaching this year.

“Alex Kennedy is definitely a good addition to the team,” junior debater Esha Datta said. “She’s a strong debater and a good coach.”

Former Lincoln-Douglas debate coach Ben Holguin, an undergraduate student at Stanford University, is leaving due to a busy acedemic and extracuricular schedule at Stanford.

“I’m overloading my schedule this year and have commitments to some student groups on campus that are more intensive than they were in the past,” Holguin said.

Holguin says he will still assist the team occasionally.

“I’ll still be helping the team intermittently and will likely attend a number of tournaments with them throughout the season,” Holguin said. “So I’ll still be involved to some degree.”

Former Lincoln-Douglas debate Nikhil Bhargava will also be unavailable to coach the team this year because he will be a teaching assistant for a computer science class at Stanford University.

“Ben and Nikhil were good coaches and they have a weird argument flair that will definitely be missed,” junior Ana Carano said. “But Alex Kennedy seems like a really good coach. She was a really good debater [in high school] and she’s already been really helpful to the team. We’ll probably do well. We’ll just have a different style.”

The debate team opened the season last weekend at the Grapevine Invitational Tournament in Grapevine, Texas and made it to Octafinals (the last sixteen), making them the most successful Californian team at the tournament.

The team’s next tournament is the Yale Invitational in New Haven, Connecticut, from Sept. 23 to 25.