Highland Park Debaters Win Back-to-Back UIL 5A State Title

Highland Park High School seniors Camden Coale and Layton Braziel did something rare last weekend. They won a state championship, then became the first team in recent memory to do it twice in a row.

The two debaters claimed their second consecutive UIL 5A cross-examination debate title, outlasting a field of more than 50 teams from across Texas to defend the crown they earned a year ago. For a program with Highland Park’s pedigree, winning state is expected. Winning back-to-back is something else entirely.

This year’s resolution put teams on both sides of a pointed policy question: whether the United States federal government should substantially change its policy toward a specified country or international organization. Competitors had no choice about which side they argued on any given round. That’s the nature of cross-examination debate. You prepare both cases, you master both arguments, and when the judge flips the coin, you perform. Coale and Braziel did exactly that, round after round, until no one was left to beat.

Cross-ex debate, as it’s known in Texas high school circles, demands more than a quick wit. Students spend months researching, building evidence files, and drilling arguments with their partners. The format rewards preparation, adaptability, and the kind of composure that doesn’t come naturally to most seventeen-year-olds standing in front of a panel of judges with thirty seconds to form a rebuttal. The fact that Coale and Braziel executed at this level twice, in consecutive seasons, points to something beyond talent. It points to discipline.

Highland Park has long fielded competitive academic teams, and debate is no exception. The program draws students who compete at the national level, who go on to law schools and policy careers, who treat the activity with the seriousness it deserves. But titles don’t happen on reputation alone. Someone still has to walk into the rounds and win them.

For Coale and Braziel, this is how their high school debate careers end. State champions, twice over, heading into whatever comes next. That’s a clean finish by any measure.

There’s a broader point here worth making, though, and it has nothing to do with trophies. Debate teaches students to engage seriously with ideas they may personally disagree with, to understand an opposing argument well enough to dismantle it, and to do all of that under pressure and on a clock. Those skills don’t stay in the competition room. They travel with the student. Into college classrooms, into careers, into civic life.

Preston Hollow and its surrounding neighborhoods have produced generations of Texans who went on to shape Dallas, the state, and sometimes the country. A meaningful number of them cut their teeth in competitive academic programs at schools like Highland Park. The work of a good debate program is quiet, unsexy, and almost never covered the way a football championship would be. The students show up anyway. The coaches show up anyway. The results, when they come, are proof that the work was worth it.

Coale and Braziel will graduate this spring. Their names will go on whatever wall or plaque Highland Park reserves for its state champions. But the more durable prize is what they carry with them: two years of learning to argue any side of a hard question, to handle pressure, to think faster than the other person in the room.

Dallas is a city that rewards confidence and preparation. These two students have spent four years building both. That’s not a bad way to leave high school.