February 17, 2026 – At the end of 2025, NAUDL unveiled our Strategic Plan— with both familiar and unexpected reasons to celebrate. Over the next five years, we aim to grow our reach from serving over 12,000 students per year to over 100,000 by working with an expanding reach of existing and new local leagues serving students from Miami to Minneapolis and Portland to Boston!
How do we do it? Supporting local debate leagues with training and resources, innovating with new partners – including a provisional league in Birmingham, and expanding and evolving our key programs to reach more schools and students around the country.
Through thoughtful collaboration with league partners (coaches, directors, boards, teachers, tournaments, etc.), we are building a growing national network to provide more debate opportunities for underserved students throughout the country.
By building new platforms for programming we are creating new entry points for students to learn critical debate and public speaking skills for life-long impact. Three bold efforts have emerged in the past few years: Debate-Inspired ClassroomsTM (Boston, Denver, and Silicon Valley) equips teachers with debate training allowing classroom debate to become a norm for active learning about history, literature, math and more! Our one-of-kind Sports Debate (Atlanta, Dallas, Tulsa) initiative leverages student and teacher interest in sports to cultivate partnerships with professional sports teams and athletes, harnessing those passions into debate team activities. Finally, in year two of our Debate en Español Round Robin, seven leagues will join the Urban Debate National Championship on Harvard’s campus in April. Debate en Español offers a pathway for heritage Spanish speakers to accelerate their learning journeys through debate as they build biliteracy skills.
Using systemic data collection and evaluation to scale the best of all of these initiatives, the Urban Debate Network will establish a framework for exponential growth, driving transformational programming and significantly impacting the broader education system.
What now? We need help spreading the word—near and far. At a time of public education funding uncertainty, we need to rethink the way we reach, empower and educate our next generation of leaders. Debate is not merely an extracurricular activity for our students. Debate as pedagogy can be introduced in any classroom, in any language, and ultimately utilized to actively engage in public affairs, sports rivalries and even geometry.
Wayne L. Firestone
NAUDL Board Co-Chair