Stunned by their success, the debate team walks away from their first competition. Every member of the Piedmont team has either enjoyed a winning streak or ended the competition undefeated. Competing against other schools who funnel thousands of dollars into their debate teams, the Piedmont team has no coach or school-based funding. But now things are changing and more opportunities are beginning to unfold as, for the first time, the debate team has selected a coach.

The new debate team coach is Jessica Jung, debate captain junior Jason Olaru-Hagen said. Last year Jung won the national college debate championship for UC Berkeley.

“Teaching is the next step,” Jung said. “I really like [debate] because it helped me to really grow as a person so I know how it pushes [students to be] more confident.”

Jung said that she felt particularly connected to the Piedmont team because they face similar problems as she faced when competing at the college level.

“At UC berkeley we didn’t have any funding or coaches,” Jung said. “We were students teaching other students.”

Jung wants to push her students not only to overcome these obstacles but to win championships like her team at UC Berkeley, she said.

“She’s really invested in our team,” Lee said. “We’re kind of an underdog. A lot of other schools [funnell] thousands of dollars into their team and we get zero. So she’s very hands on and (has) a group approach.”

Despite these obstacles, last April the captains decided that they were going to change from a casual to more intense program, Olaru-Hagen said. They did not have a coach so similar to Jung’s team at UC Berkeley, the captains put together a rigorous curriculum to teach the rest of their peers.

“We want to get to a level of performance that I don’t think we could reach before,” Olaru-Hagen said. “We want to send kids to Nationals.”

Even before getting a coach, their hard work was starting to pay off, speech captain Ang Lee said. But they had reached the point where the captains were starting to run out of the curriculum to teach. They needed to get a coach.

“There’s only so much we can do as students,” Lee said. “We can only compete to certain levels. Having a coach has allowed us to take that next step, to be more competitive as a team and to finally make a name for ourselves.”

Originally, a few members of debate met Jung last summer during a debate program, Asa Levine said. When they discovered that she was already going to be coaching at the middle school they decided to look into finding a way to also hire her for the high school. However, due to the fact that PHS does not give funding to non-core classes, it was extremely difficult.

“We’ve tried [registration],” Lee said. “We’ve gone down the list. It’s much more complicated than it seems.”

In order to get around this financial boundary, Jung was hired through a partnership between the Piedmont Recreation Department and Piedmont High School (PHS), Olaru-Hagen said.

“Now if you want to join the debate team, you pay to the rec department, but everything now is kind of run through the school,” Olaru-Hagen said. “It’s kind of a hybrid of both, and we figured out how to work out together.”

Levine has been involved with debate since the beginning of seventh grade and always encourages new members to join, he said. Not only did he meet some of his best friends through debate, he learned other important life skills as well.

“I’m much more comfortable with public speaking,” he said.

Lee also encourages everyone to try debate, he said.

“Yes, it is intimidating at first,” he said. “When I first started it was mortifying, but I stuck with it. And here I am now and we have a coach. So I think everyone should try it and stick with it, even if it’s scary.”