Debate Land note: Harris Layson is a top-ranked LD debater who competes for Lake Highland Prep in Florida. He has received 8 TOC bids, reaching finals at 5 tournaments including, Harvard and Emory. We are thrilled to spend some time discussing and sharing how Harris approaches debate.

Harris’s Rise to the Top:

Harris began his debate journey in 8th grade but didn’t begin competing nationally until his freshman year of high school. In the 2021-2022 season, he had a 48 percent win percentage and a peak ranking of 409. Over the summer, he attended NSD and drilled every day internalizing his core position. During the 2022-2023 year, he earned his first bid and rose to a peak rank of 70. By his junior year, it all came together, Harris broke at 100% of bid tournaments, touting a true win percentage of 93.6% and championing tournaments like Emory and Lexington.

Keys To Success:

Learning one position:

"My improvement can be attributed to the amount of time I spent on drills. I think that people put too much emphasis on how much prep they cut and how much they want to know about debate. But I feel like I put a lot of energy into memorizing and learning one position…and I would just drill every day over the summer, and then I just memorized responses to everything. I think that getting good at one really small area of debate helped me get good at the other areas as I slowly branched out."

Experiment:

In our interview, Harris discussed a year-long process of finding his argument. He began with being obsessed with Deleuze and only stumbled upon his now preferred K when a coach suggested it before a round.

He believes the key to landing on your arguments and style is experimentation. One of the best ways to "breakthrough" is to attempt new positions. Once you find that K or DA that sparks your interest and you understand it well, the next task is implementing a successful strategy to win.

Construct Versitle Cases:

A small number of positions doesn’t mean you have a limited path to the ballot. Harris explains:

“Understand that your arguments have a lot more implications than the ones you might intend. So, you need to have multiple visions of how you want to end the round and how you want to access different parts of it and then find commonalities between the ways you can do that."

Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.