LD at the UTNIF
The UTNIF Lincoln-Douglas workshop is open to students of all skill levels. The purpose of the workshop is to prepare students to compete in regional LD competition. The workshop will focus on developing fundamentals and building a repertoire of arguments that will last through topic rotations.
The 2025 LD Curriculum Director is Temitope Ogundare. Temitope competed for 8 years at Newark Science and Rutgers-Newark across varying formats. She’s been coaching LD and policy for several years now and loves being an educator. While Temitope was competitive during her career, her proudest accomplishments are the success of her students both in their championing of tournaments and their intellectual growth! She loves teaching critical and policy based strategies with her top 3 2NRS being the K, T, DA and believes that more debaters should be willing to engage both sides of the library. She loves the practice of research and is excited to have discussions on all the ins and out of debates in both contents and forms. Temitope served as the UTNIF Curriculum Director in 2024.
The LD lab assistant will be Ashley Lourenco. Ashley debated in Policy and LD for 6 years at Newark Science and will be attending Amherst College in the Fall (feel free to talk to her about it)! From junior to senior year, she was in elimination rounds of national tournaments and received multiple round robin invites. She earned numerous bids to the TOC in both LD and Policy. She was the NJ state champion her last 3 years of high school in Policy and qualified to NSDA in Policy three times. She has the most expansive background in identity Ks and would love most to talk about T and K 2NRs but is also excited to talk about foundational policy skills!