Finding Their Voice & Friendship With ASAP

As co-captain of ASAP’s Debate team at Bodine High School, senior Leah smoothly delivers well- researched contentions at league matches, confidently recalibrating her arguments in anticipation of her opponents’ rebuttals. But she wasn’t always an assured presence at the podium.

Thinking Debate was just going to be a small club where Bodine students would talk amongst themselves, Leah joined the team with some friends. But then she realized she had actually joined a league with competing high schools from across the city. And she panicked. 

“I did not want to go to my first debate,” Leah says. Or her second. Or third. But Lauren Geschel, Bodine’s ASAP Debate coach, saw something in Leah she didn’t see in herself.

Just as pivotal in Leah’s debate journey was her longtime debate partner, fellow senior and co-captain Khader. 

“Khader is an amazing second speaker, and I’m a first speaker,” Leah says. “So when he’s speaking second, I have more confidence to say the other things that I want to say, and he gives me more ideas.” 

Khader is also deeply grateful for the support Leah gives him: “Whenever I’m like, ‘should I say this? Is this valid?’ she’s always like, ‘yeah, go ahead!’…it encourages me to always speak on what I believe.”  

The deep trust these debate besties have in each other hasn’t just helped them win matches—it gave them the confidence to take on the entire Philadelphia School Board when funding for extracurriculars like ASAP Debate was threatened last fall! 

Leah, Khader, and a few other Philly high schoolers “literally sat individually, one by one in a chair in front of” the board, says Khader. “And we’ve seen an outcome out of it! That was mind-blowing to us.” 

The transformation Leah has experienced in just three years, from shy 10^th grader to confident senior orating in front of City leaders, is not lost on her. And both Leah and Khader feel a responsibility to help other kids enjoy the same opportunities through Debate that they have. 

“For kids like us, people that want to go into things like this, people that were just like me before I joined Debate—I was shy and timid—that want to voice their opinions: we fought for people like them,” Leah says. “These are your future lawyers.” (And doctors! Khader wants to use the skills he’s learned in debate to fix inequality in healthcare).