photo by: University of Kansas

From left to right, Graham Revare and John Marshall won the Owen L. Coon Memorial Debate Tournament at Northwestern University, which took place Sept. 14-17 in 2024.

If the debate season were over right now, Free State High School alumnus John Marshall and his University of Kansas debate partner Graham Revare would finish as the top team in the U.S.

In debate, KU debate director Scott Harris said, there’s no formal poll of coaches or media that ranks teams like in sports programs. But Marshall, a junior at KU, and Revare, a senior, have amassed the best record in the nation — 55-9 — across multiple regular-season tournaments, and Marshall added another distinction to his resume at a recent tournament at Georgetown University — first-place individual speaker.

“We want to be as successful as we can be, and we’re both really competitive,” Marshall said. “So it’s been a fun season.”

In the Georgetown tourney in Washington, D.C., Marshall and Revare rolled through the preliminary debates with a 6-1 record, then beat another KU team in the round of 32, NYU in the round of 16, Wake Forest in the quarterfinals, Michigan State in the semifinals and Emory in the finals. For good measure, Revare was the fifth-place individual speaker in the tourney.

Big successes like that have been the norm for them this season, and Harris told the Journal-World via email that right now, “Kansas MR” is the team to beat.

“There are upcoming tournaments at Dartmouth and Texas that could change who is ultimately the number one team over the course of the regular season, (and) that will be announced at the National Debate Tournament, but at this point, in my opinion, Kansas MR would be the top ranked team if the season ended today,” Harris said.

photo by: University of Kansas

KU Debate team members in Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 3-6 tournament at Georgetown University. Seated on couch, from left: Rose Larson, Zach Willingham, Owen Williams and Ethan Harris. Seated on floor: John Marshall. Seated in chair: Jacob Wilkus. Standing: Luna Schultz and Graham Revare.

KU’s debaters were successful on multiple fronts earlier this month. Not only did Marshall and Revare win at Georgetown, but another KU team — Claire Ain, of Overland Park, and Jared Spiers, of Pittsburg — took first place in a tourney that KU hosted in Lawrence on the same weekend that a foot of snow fell on the city.

“It is no small task to host a tournament in a blizzard while traveling teams on the same weekend to a snowed-in Washington, D.C.,” Harris said in a press release.

This year, the topic that Marshall and Revare have been debating on has been energy policy. The season runs through April, and it’s a constant arms race to research the topic, study the competition’s strategies and improve your arguments right up to the end.

“To get better, you have to be consistently staying up to date on current events that might implicate your topic, continuing to research and improve your arguments in response to what other teams and schools around the country have been saying,” Marshall said. “That’s really the main focus for us.”

When the National Debate Tournament finally arrives — April 3-7 at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington — Marshall and Revare are hoping to take home the title.

It’s nothing new for Marshall: At Free State, he was a national champion, too.

As the Journal-World reported, when he was a senior in high school, Marshall and teammate Serena Rupp won the national championship at the Tournament of Champions hosted by the University of Kentucky. Their win was not only the first national debate championship in Free State High School and Lawrence school district history, but also the first for a team from Kansas.

“We were the first team in Kansas to win that tournament, and it was the first national championship that the Free State team had ever won,” Marshall said. “It was really cool and also a little bit unexpected.”