In eighth grade, Emma Cook received a letter from her high school from the debate teacher suggesting she join debate due to her academic performance. This presented a dilemma: should she take debate, or varsity choir?
“Sometimes, I reflect on how different my life would be if I had chosen varsity choir instead of debate.” Cook said. “It’s like the branching choices.”
This small decision led to a life of honing argumentation skills, coaching new generations of students, and judging the effectiveness of ideas. She went on to major in communications in college and coach Jordan’s debate team.
Cook grew up in Buda, Texas and went to college at Wake Forest in North Carolina. At Wake Forest, Cook was a dedicated member of the Policy Debate team. Outside of school, Cook spends many of her weekends at tournaments. However, on days when she is free, she enjoys hiking, driving to Austin to see family, rock climbing, and playing with her two cats Minou and Khoshekh.
“I went to Brazos Bend recently. Got to be really uncomfortably close to a lot of alligators.” Cook said. “Over the summer, I did a road trip into Kansas and then back down because my goal is to hike [to] get to the highest point of all 50 states. So I was doing Oklahoma and Kansas, and on the way, I stopped at Palo Duro.”
Having spent time in both high school and college debate, she prefers high school debate because the environment of college debate can be toxic. However, she likes the travel opportunities of college debate teams.
“At Wake Forest, there’s a lot more financial support.” Cook said. “They have a billion dollar endowment or something like that, and so there’s more coaches, more assistant coaches, that kind of stuff, than I had in high school. We also travel a lot more… In my high school, we never left Texas… So we never really went outside of our local area. And in college, you have to travel all over the country, because there’s not usually a school that’s near you that hosts a tournament.”
One of Cook’s favorite memories in debate was when she was a freshman in college. At the first competition of the season, their school had a team that was competing in finals. It was at around 2 a.m. when the round finished and they announced their results. When they found out their team had won, their group of about thirty students and teachers all burst into applause and cheers.
“Everyone was super happy and we were all super tired, and it was just a really cool environment.” Cook said. “The part about the whole environment of just everyone being so excited and supportive was really fun.”
One of Cook’s most memorable students, Idara Etuks, was a student that competed in the Congress event and placed third in the National Speech and Debate Association’s National Finals in her senior year. Cook thinks both her students and herself have a lot to learn from Etuks’ mindset, and how she approached the activity. She also speaks on Etuks’ “Thank You” speech that all students competing in national finals make, in which she thanked Cook.
“That was really special and nice to be able to see that,” Cook said. “because in this job a lot of the time, debate coaches generally sacrifice a lot of our lives for kids to be able to compete, and we don’t get a lot of recognition for that. And just to have her be in front of a live studio audience recorded on video in perpetuity, for her to be like, thank you. It was really nice.”
Cook has many good memories of debate over the years. She likes to travel for tournaments, since the team generally travels at least twice a month. At a tournament in Churchill, the school won sweepstakes and all the students were given confetti eggs. She stood on stage as her students threw confetti filled eggs at her, which she says she enjoyed. However, she didn’t enjoy finding confetti everywhere for the next week.
“It’s nice to be able to kind of work with kids and see them grow,” Cook said. “from being really, really scared, to being confident and outgoing and really able to kind of handle challenges in the later years of doing the activity.”
When asked what advice she had for the student body, Cook talked about her old school’s motto: “Person first, academics second, and debate third.” With Jordan’s academic rigor, she wants all students to prioritize themselves over academics and extracurriculars.
“I think that that is something to extend to the whole student body.” Cook said, “at Jordan, everyone is pushing so hard all of the time in academics and in all the extracurriculars that they do, they always want to be the best. And if they don’t get immediate results, it affects their mental state, so much.”
