I had a lot of fun in La Crosse shooting the shit with Scheffler, Traas, Jess, Steve, Rob, and others. Mike, Tim, and Jess had a lot of fun relating to me some of the funnier stories from some of East’s road trips of old. And while I haven’t been on that many road trips, and on those trips that I have been on with my own team, I’ve acted more like a fretful mother, than a fun loving college coach. This is of course, something I regret, because most of my team won’t be hear next year. And the debaters I’ve worked with and come to know for the last three years, will be bum college kids next year, like their assistant coach. (They’re all seniors).
But I did get an interesting e-mail today. At the end of my senior year, I finally began to find out the details of how good the 1992 Sheboygan North Debate team of Renzelman and Maxon was. When I found out that they were in the Harvard Round Robin (Round Robins are very prestigious things, because only a select few teams compete in them) and broke to deep out rounds in the Harvard Tournament, as well as qualifying for the TOC, I was excited. The fact that some team from Sheboygan had done this made me believe that it could happen again, even if I wasn’t the debater that returned to the TOC. In fact, after Brian’s awesome performance at Wake Forest, it’s been a very explicit goal of Tim and mine to be in Kentucky the first weekend in May. (That’s when the TOC is held. The TOC is the Tournament of Champions; it is the third national tournament for debate. It is the national circuit championship and the most prestigious tournament for debate, because it maintains an exceedingly difficult qualifying procedure that has absolutely nothing with geographic representation. The other debate national championships, the NCFL and the NFL are based on geographic representation.)
As I became a coach and judge, and hung out with some of the older Wisconsin coaches (Bill McBride, Cliff Morton, Mike Traas, Corry Puuri, and of course, Tim), I got to know more about the old Sheboygan North Debate program. I eventually started to do more research on the subject, and eventually tried to get a hold of Jason, Paul, and their varsity coach, Gerard Girsby. My intent was to try and put together a small paper, or at least an understanding of the History of Sheboygan North Debate and how it went from being a very nationally competitive, to the near elimination of the activity.
Within a few months, I found Gerard’s email, but received no immediate reply to my questions. But not soon after I began my search (using a debate listserv that reaches a lot of people, is posted on the web, and catalogued by search engines), I got an email from Paul Maxon. Paul was very helpful in trying to provide me with a lot of information. Bill Batterman, a friend and coach, upon hearing of my investigation, threw some of his great researching skills behind my effort. This summer, I received a few emails from Gerard Himself. As limited as his responses were (he was working at a debate camp, and as such, had very little time), they were exceedingly helpful. And now today, through the same channels that Paul found my email, I received another email from Dave Henning. I have no idea who he is, but he apparently was one of Gerard’s friends, a coach at Marquette (probably when Jim Copeland was still around) and the head coach of Memorial during the 1980’s (the time period when they accumulated all the trophies that now sit a box above Hardin’s desk).
It may seem that this long-winded litany of information has no point. But that is simply not true. I’ve decided to at some point, finally compile all of the information that I need to write this history. As a coach of debate, who now sits on the verge of losing his second program, the answer to this question of what happened to Sheboygan, is very important. Devoting time to unearth this history has officially become my side project.
