8 minute read
A Winning Argument
MTSU debate coach (and Honors associate professor) helps University win 11 national championships
by Skip Anderson
Pat Richey, MTSU’s director of forensics, who has coached the Blue Raider debate team to 11 individual and team national championships, doesn’t remember when he won his first argument. But he remembers vividly when his then 4-year-old daughter Abby first outwitted an opponent—her mother.
“Her mom said she could bring one Barbie doll with her on a trip,” Richey said. When Abby’s mom noticed that the child had in fact brought two dolls, she queried her daughter, saying, ‘I thought I said that you could bring one doll, not two.’ ”
“No,” Abby calmly corrected her mother. “You said I could bring one ‘Barbie’ doll. This other one is Tiana from a Disney movie.”
“I told my wife, ‘She gotcha!’ ” said Richey, who is also an Honors associate professor of Communication Studies at MTSU.
Like Richey, his wife, Becky Joyce, was a military kid. And, like him, she is outstanding at debate. The couple, now married 22 years, even met at a debate and would later become debate partners. In fact, he proposed to her while they were at a debate in Toronto.
“I wanted to ask her [to marry me] at Niagara Falls,” Richey said. “But the falls were frozen over. So I took her to a nice restaurant instead.”
The couple also have a son, Robert, who at 13 is four years younger than Abby.
“Becky was very good at debate,” Richey said. “She’ll tell you she wasn’t, but she was. She wins more of the debates at home than I do. So I’ve really learned to pick my battles.”
Putting It Into Practice
Now it’s his students who take up the battles at competitions.
MTSU’s debate team, despite being outmatched in size by nearly 4 to 1 compared to many of the schools it competes with, is a heavyweight in college debate and has won 11 national championships since Richey became coach in 2011.
“We are a really small program, and we’re very student-centric,” he said. “We have a terrific assistant coach in Dr. Natonya Listach, but we don’t have a lot of money, so we’re largely student-run; the captains do a lot of heavy lifting, which gives them life skills like how to manage people.”
According to Richey, the quality of students on the Blue Raider debate team makes up for what it lacks in numbers.
“We have real talent in the student population at MTSU,” Richey said. “We can hold our own against flagship institutions.”
I was doing debate in college and about to get out of the military when 9/11 happened.
Richey understands the passion his students have for debate. He himself first became interested in debate in middle school when he took a mandatory class that split its time between theater and debate. And although he was on the debate team in high school, forensics hadn’t yet sparked his nascent interest into a lifelong passion.
He was a self-described “meh” student in high school who would have rather worked on a car than work out a persuasive argument. Despite that, he showed promise as a debater.
“I won the first debate I had,” he said, referring to New Mark Middle School in Kansas City, Missouri, before continuing to the next level. “Oak Park High School was a debate powerhouse by the time I got there. However, high school forensics can become extremely toxic and far too competitive. It was still just something for me to do rather than it being a true passion.”
After graduation, that changed.
“I joined the Army Reserves, and that put me on a straight track,” Richey said. “I was doing debate in college and about to get out of the military when 9/11 happened.”
The government almost immediately issued a stop-loss order.
“A stop-loss order means they hold onto people with certain skill sets: pilots, medics, special forces, and so forth. As a result, I spent nine years in the military on a four-year contract,” he said. “I was at Louisiana Christian College in Pineville at the beginning of my senior year when the planes hit the twin towers.”
As a civil affairs sergeant, his skills were also in demand. Attached to the 4th Infantry Division out of Tikrit, Richey served in Iraq during the invasion and the following year.
Civil affairs officers are responsible for serving as a liaison between a “host community” and the military.
“Civil affairs are involved before, during, and after a war,” Richey said. “Before and during a war, we make sure civilians are off the battlefield, and we mark the heritage sites. After conflict, we help rebuild. In Iraq, we had a tough task as there was very little infrastructure left—no water, no electricity, and very little sanitation.”
Being deployed in a war zone largely meant that he wasn’t able to do a lot of formal debating. However, there was one notable exception.
“While I was in Iraq, I was in an online debate,” he said. “I debated for the fictitious University of Baghdad, and I ended up winning it. We did that via satellite; this was long before smart phones. I ended up winning it.”
I also want my students to kill their opponents with kindness.
Building A Powerhouse
So, what’s the key to MTSU’s winning ways?
“I teach the students that if you learn to do debate right, the wins will come,” he said. “And sometimes the best win comes when you lose, meaning a person may have truly beat you and you have to accept that. I tell the team, there’s no such thing as a debater who can’t be beat, including you.”
He also takes an underhanded approach to their training, in a way.
“When I practice with the students, I use every dirty trick I can think of,” Richey said. “That way I can see them process [something unfair happening] and see how they're going to respond.”
A “dirty trick” in debate could be as simple as misrepresenting the words the students say.
“So, for instance, I might say, ‘You said this was the case,’ when they clearly didn’t,” he explained.
Richey also reminds them not to let go of reason by getting dragged into an emotional debate.
“I remind them that it’s not about winning that argument, it’s about convincing the judge with logic that you’re right.” he said. “I also want my students to kill their opponents with kindness. A lot of people will get very upset, and when that happens they just collapse. Using dirty tricks on them when practicing, [it] conditions them for that. It teaches them to relax and work through the problem.”
Recent graduate Elliot Certain, a Social Work major with an Honors minor, also praised debate’s real-life merits.
“Life’s really built on communication,” he said. “Whenever you’re in conflict, for some people, their first reaction is to get really red in the face and start screaming, throwing things.
“[Debate] teaches you how to stay calm in conflict and actually reach a resolution, not just . . . fight. And that’s something that any major can benefit from. . . . It’s a fundamental of human communication.”
Blue Raider Debate History
MTSU has a long-standing debate tradition that harkens back to the earliest days of the school.
Middle Tennessee State Normal opened in 1911. Male students founded the first literary society (the forerunner of modern debate teams), the Claxton Society, the same year. The following year another group of male students founded the Henry W. Grady Literary Society; soon to follow were two women’s literary societies. At first the literary societies (mostly the two men’s societies) debated each other.
In the early 1920s Middle Tennessee began to send its best debaters to East Tennessee Normal and West Tennessee Normal (now East Tennessee State and the University of Memphis) while at the same time, these schools would send their best debaters to Middle Tennessee. These public presentations were special events, and people from Nashville would come to hear the speakers. Andrew L. Todd, former speaker of both the Tennessee Senate and the House of Representatives, was not only one of the founders of the school but also a major proponent of the debating program. He personally paid for the prize medallion for round robin debate.
The debaters spoke on issues such as women’s suffrage and states’ rights. Middle Tennessee expanded its traveling range and often debated in Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. The literary societies began to decline in the late 1930s because of the Great Depression and finally phased out during World War II.
After WWII, modern debate teams as we now know them began. The teams were specifically designed to debate other teams on centralized topics, with a coach rather than a student leading the team.
Middle Tennessee was no different. In 1948 Lane Boutwell began coaching the team. He brought the Pi Kappa Delta forensics honor society to campus in 1952. The team grew and became very successful under the leadership of coaches James Skeine, David Walker, Jim Brooks, and Russell Church. The team regularly won many prestigious tournaments and awards in regional and national tournaments and sent three teams to the National Debate Tournament Championship. The team also was active on campus hosting the British Debate Series from the 1970s forward and campus forums on local, state, and national issues.
Researching and debating the national debate topic of product safety in 1976–77, the team contributed significant research and personal testimony to state legislators as Tennessee led the nation in passing the first state law requiring children to use child safety seats in automobiles.
