Columba girls put in an enormous effort over the weekend at the Otago Regional Debating Tournament.

Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the tournament took place online this year. The Columba team competed together, from school, and came away with amazing results!

We had four teams speaking in a pool of 20 of the top teams from all over Otago.

• Columba 4 (Elaina Fu, Mary Mengel, Bianca van der Haegen) ended on 3 wins out of the 6 which was a very impressive effort for a much younger team as they ended up in the top 8 of all teams!

• Columba 3 (Alice Johnston, Leila Luckhurst, Shela Luckhurst, Nora Paicu) also ended on 3 wins in the top 8, while impressively beating teams that ended up breaking into semis and staying at the top of the table for the majority of the tournament.

• Columba 2 (Zoe McElrea, Skyla Murray, Tessa Smith) ended on 4 wins and only narrowly missed out on making semi-finals on speaking points - an outstanding effort!

• Columba 1 (Sophie Davis, Sophie Bowmar, Anise Maclean) also finished on 4 wins and managed to break 2nd in the semi-finals, with the highest speaking points out of all teams. Unfortunately, they lost in a close debate in the semis so did not progress through to the finals, but finished 3rd out of the overall tournament which was a great achievement.

In addition to these team achievements, many Columba individuals were awarded prizes and made squads and teams at the prize-giving ceremony. Congratulations to Alice Johnston, Anise Maclean, Nora Paicu, Tessa Smith and Zoe Mcelrea who were all named in the Otago Development Squad for 2022, and to Shela Luckhurst who was named in the Otago Gold Squad. Columba had far more members named than any other school and these girls should be very proud! Furthermore, Sophie Bowmar was renamed in the Otago Regional team that will compete at Nationals later this year, and Sophie Davis was named as a reserve to this team - a particularly notable achievement as a Year 12!

The final awards of the night were the Most Promising Speaker and Best Speaker of the Otago Regionals. Impressively, both of these went to Columba girls! An enormous congratulations to Alice Johnston (Y11) for taking out Most Promising Speaker in Otago and to Sophie Bowmar for taking out Best Speaker of Otago for 2022.

Columba couldn’t have accomplished all we did without the support of Mrs Graves who gave up her entire weekend to be there and support us. The Columba debating group would like to extend an enormous thanks to her for all she did!