Every EC competitor at last week’s national community college forensics tournament came home with hardware in hand.

The tournament, called the Phi Rho Pi National Community College Tournament, took place April 11-17 at the Woodland Hills Marriott, and was run by Phi Rho Pi national honors society for community college forensic teams.

“It was so much fun,” 16-year-old Mary Freitag (undeclared) said. “My partner, Andrea Danihel, and I were so excited when we won the bronze award, and not just that we won, but that all our teams won. Because at that time, everybody can go home with something and it was very nice.”

Freitag won a bronze medal in parliamentary debate with Danihel after beating four of six teams that covered a broad range of topics, one of which involved cows and their effect on the environment.

Because of the team’s success at the tournament, the EC forensic team was able to end the year with the title as the second best community college debate team in the country. The team also ranks 7th among more than 350 colleges across the country, ahead of Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, USC and Claremont College.

The EC forensics team took five debate teams, all of which advanced to elimination rounds, and won awards consisting of two gold, two silver, and one bronze.

EC itself won an overall sweepstakes for parliamentary debate by a wide margin.

The next school in parliamentary debate had only won a gold and silver award.

Stephanie Rhodes won the tournament’s title of the top speaker of the tournament in parliamentary debate.

John Suzuki ended up winning the title of the top impromptu speaker in the U.S. and a gold award in the competition category.

“We are a debate school; primarily we do all events, but we specialize in debate, so when we win overall debate, that is always our goal,” coach Francesca Bishop said.

“I think it’s our fifth or sixth year in a row that we’ve won overall in debate at that tournament; however this is the first time we have won by such a margin,” she added.