Edmund Zagorin and Maria Liu preparing for a debate. The duo has been U-M’s top debate team for the past three years, but 2011 was their year to contend for the national championship. (Photo courtesy Maria Liu.)

It’s a balmy Sunday on the first day of spring, but a dozen students, members of the University of Michigan debate team, are oblivious to the sunny skies. They’re sitting in a small, windowless room at the Michigan Union, practicing for a upcoming national tournament in Dallas. While her teammate holds the stop watch, Maria Liu, a 19-year-old junior, steps to the makeshift podium to practice her argument: the U.S. should increase its immigration of foreign nurses to respond to a nursing shortage.

(Above) High-velocity argument: U-M’s Maria Liu and Edmund Zagorin (they’re the first to speak) debating in 2010 against Kansas.

Liu lays out a logical, well-reasoned argument, impeccable in its structure, stuffed with facts…and nearly impossible to understand. Not because of its complexity, but because she’s speaking faster than an auctioneer, blurting out torrents of words, occasionally gasping for breath.

Welcome to the world of competitive debate. It’s an intense endeavor requiring hours of preparation, a compendious memory, a nimble mind—and a killer instinct. Debaters work in teams of two; each debate season focuses on a common subject—for 2010-11 it was immigration reform and visas—and teams must be ready to argue, basically at random, an “affirmative” or “negative” position on that subject.

They make their case in a nine minute constructive speech followed by a three minute cross-examination period and six minute rebuttal. Judges assess their arguments and declare a winner accordingly.

If your opponent speaks faster, and makes twice as many arguments, you’ll be at a disadvantage, so debaters speak at speeds of roughly 600 words per minute. The judges, says University of Michigan head debate coach Aaron Kall, are former college debaters versed in this style.

“Their ears are trained to hear a higher rate of speed, so it’s not foreign to them,” he says.

The University of Michigan debate team is considered a perennial power, but a national championship has always eluded them. This year, though, was shaping up to be Michigan’s best chance to seize the title. Liu and fifth-year senior Edmund Zagorin, 23, were “one of the best teams around,” said Jarrod Atchison, a director of debate at Wake Forest University, who judged them in a dozen debates. They had been Michigan’s top pair for the past three years, winning an amazing 20 debates—a feat achieved by fewer than 20 teams since 1946.

Atchison said they “demonstrate that to be extremely successful you need to be able to research, comprehend, and argue against a wide variety of positions.” He said it was often difficult for opponents to predict their strategy or pin them down.

Now their talent had been seasoned by experience. Liu was a junior and Zagorin a fifth-year senior. The upcoming tournament in Dallas would be Zagorin’s last, and perhaps U-M’s best shot at the title for some time.

“We weren’t favored to win,”said Kall, “but I thought we could.”

Zagorin had been a top high school debater at Georgetown Day School, but college competition proved to be a far more “intense experience.” He said the amount of required research per debater “equals that which is done on a Master’s thesis.” But he has thrived under the pressure. This year he was one of just two people selected for the American Debate Team.Zagorin lives debate round-the-clock, co-habiting with five other teammates who understand each other’s demanding schedules.

A master researcher, he says he typically spends 15 to 20 hours a week preparing for a major tournament. A debater “can learn how to research and in a matter of days or weeks become the equivalent of most experts in terms of knowledge,” he says. He’s intensely focused when he speaks, like someone absorbed in prayer, and in his passion he will occasionally allow an outburst of profanity—ridiculing an opponent’s point, for instance, as “bull__.”

Zagorin says unlike competitive sports, where you can lose points for swearing, judges generally tolerate it. It’s “a great way to add emphasis to the thrust of an argument,” so that it better stands out. He adds that since it’s so much of an average college student’s daily speech, there isn’t an obligation to self-censor.

When Zagorin was paired with Liu, she had just graduated high school after skipping a year, so she had substantially less experience, though Kall was impressed with her potential after seeing her in action at a U-M debate camp. Kall says through her hard work, she quickly advanced and the two developed a complimentary rhythm.

“Her talent lies in technical policy arguments and I do more wide-ranging research that’s a little less organized,” Zagorin says.

“We’re polar opposites,” says Liu. “We work well in that sense.”

Their first big challenge this season came in a high-stakes tournament in Athens, Georgia, in January. The two were favored to win—against teams from Harvard, Wake Forest and the University of Texas-Dallas—but despite their strength, no team from U-M had won a national-level debate in a decade. This was the team’s first opportunity to notch a major victory.

But after winning their debates on the first day, Liu spent that Saturday night vomiting after contracting food poisoning from a hamburger. Bedridden and dehydrated, she was too sick to debate the second day, and Zagorin debated solo, winning all his matches. But if Liu didn’t rally and debate on the third day, they would have to forfeit the tournament.

Liu had until Sunday at 10 p.m. to make her decision. “I was concerned for her,” Zagorin said, “and I was worried that we were going to have to drop out of the tournament.”

Coach Kall spent the day hoping desperately that she would pull through. “That was one of our best chances of the year to win a tournament in the last several years,” he said. “And it would be wasted if they had to withdraw.”

“I know Edmund needed me,” Liu said.  “I drank a ton of vitamin water, ate saltine crackers and got energy.”

But the team waited in limbo until two minutes before the deadline. Finally Liu told Kall she was feeling better and could debate in the morning. Their last match-up was against Harvard. The Harvard team made the affirmative argument, proposing a visa policy-reform plan that they said propped up U.S. influence in the Middle East, and that this was important to prevent Russian influence within the Middle East.

Zagorin and Liu proffered a surprising and creative negative argument: that expanding Russia’s sphere of influence was good—and that attempts to restrict Russia’s sphere of influence would make Russia angry and more likely to attempt to destabilize the world.

David Heidt, assistant director of Michigan debate, said that argument was fresh and hadn’t been made previously by another team, so Harvard wasn’t expecting it, and therefore was less prepared to respond. “We had a good strategy that we thought Harvard would not anticipate, and this gave us a fairly strong competitive edge,” said Heidt.

Kall couldn’t wait around for the verdict, since he needed to fly back to Ann Arbor with the rest of the students, so Heidt stayed behind to hear the decision, which wasn’t read until 10:00 that night, a half hour after the debate concluded. Then Heidt heard words that were music to his ears: “The decision is 3-0 for Michigan.” Liu and Zagorin had won the tournament, their biggest victory together.

Heidt immediately texted Kall the news, which he read while on the plane. “With all the obstacles to overcome, to finish the way we did was very satisfying,” says Kall. Said Liu: “It was definitely worth it to persevere and debate through the sickness.”

If that match in Georgia had been a big “regular season” game, the stakes were even higher at the national championship in Dallas. Michigan’s first match-up was daunting: Emory University had been ranked number one for the past two years. Zagorin and Liu had beaten other teams in the tournament, but they had never debated Emory. When Liu heard Emory would be their first opponent, she was so nervous she had to listen to soothing tunes on her iPod to calm herself.

They started out with an advantage, winning the coin flip that allowed them to choose to argue affirmative or negative. Liu said the affirmative side often has the advantage, since they can present an argument that their opponents aren’t ready for, and the affirmative has had time to prepare and research the argument more fully. Winning the coin flip let Zagorin and Liu do just this: they launched a new affirmative argument they’d been practicing the week before in the Michigan Union. In past competitions, they had argued that more highly-skilled immigrants in the fields of business, science and technology should be allowed in the country. But in this debate they shifted the topic, contending that more nurses should be let in the country due to the nursing shortage and the aging crisis in the U.S.

The new angle, Kall said, caught the Emory team off guard. Even so, the opponents recovered and made a strong start of their own. Under enormous pressure, Kall said, Zagorin stepped up to deliver his rebuttal. It was “one of the best speeches I’ve seen him give in his career,” Kall said. Again, the Emory debaters counter-punched; U-M needed Liu to deliver.

“Maria’s last speech needed to be close to perfect and it was,” Kall said.

The debate was so close that, after an hour of deliberations, the debate director finally ordered the judges to reach a decision. They awarded the win to Michigan; Zagorin and Liu advanced to the semi-finals to debate Northwestern.

This time, U-M lost the coin toss and was forced to take the negative position. Then Northwestern pulled the same sort of surprise that Liu and Zagorin had used to win their earlier debate with Emory: a new affirmative that the Wolverines weren’t prepared for, a complicated technical argument about certain kinds of visas. Liu and Zagorin responded with a daring gambit. Their “negative” was a topicality argument: that Northwestern’s affirmative position didn’t fall under the assigned debate topic.

Arguing that an argument is off topic “is always risky,” Kall said. “It’s an all or nothing approach.”

But Kall and the team felt that Northwestern had successfully seized the initiative, and the odds of this debate weren’t in their favor. The risk seemed worth it.

A half hour after the debate ended, the judges announced the results. Zagorin and Liu had lost, placing third overall out of 75 teams. The chance for a national title had evaded U-M once again. Liu’s emotions got the best of her, and she started crying. More than disappointment over the defeat,” she said, “I was sad to see our partnership end.”

Still, Zagorin was pleased with the third place finish. “I was sad that it was over and I was happy at how good it had been,” he said. Zagorin also took home an eighth place persuasive speaker award—out of 160 students.

Over the season, U-M had beaten teams from such schools as Harvard, Emory, and the University of California at Berkeley. Though Kall had pinned his hopes on a national title, “I was very proud of their efforts, ” he said.

This was the eighth time that the team made it to the “final four,” and the second time in four years. Only two other teams, Wake Forest and Northwestern, have made the semi-finals as often.

Zagorin graduated this spring, and he will serve as an assistant debate coach even as he works to launch a media production company called Giant Eel Productions with other graduating seniors. He said the problem-solving required in getting the venture off the ground is a skill he learned in debating. Though he’s excited by this new chapter in his life, it will be tough to leave debating, which provided him “one of the most amazing intellectual and social experiences” in his life.

Liu will find out who her new partner is this summer. Kall says she’ll remain one of the country’s top debaters, though it’s unclear if she’ll be as successful when her partner is less experienced than Zagorin. But losing only two seniors on his team, he’s optimistic about next year’s prospects. And he insists that U-M will be back next year: a national title “remains our number one goal,” he says.

What do you think of the debate team’s efforts? Are you a debate fan or former debater? Share your stories in the comments section.