The Pace
DEBATE
D Y N A S T Y
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A national leader, the debate program celebrates four decades of excellence
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The Beginning
ne could argue that the 1971-72 school year was the most formative in Pace Academy’s history. Students arrived on the first day to a campus transformed by several construction projects: additional classrooms and a library had been added to Bridges Hall, a natatorium was erected behind Boyd Gymnasium and new tennis courts sat at the rear of the campus. The fledgling school had received a record 1,800 applications for admission the previous spring, and 100 new students joined the student body, a huge number by Pace standards. To accommodate the influx of students, Headmaster FRANK KALEY, entering what would be his final year at Pace, hired a number of new teachers. Among the group of first-year faculty was GEORGE MENGERT, now in his 40th year at the school. His charge was to teach English and direct the theatre program, but Kaley and Upper School Principal BOB CHAMBERS had additional plans for their new recruit. The school participated in the Georgia High School Literary Meet, a springtime competition that included events such oneact plays, essay writing, extemporaneous speaking, spelling—“everything you don’t
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KnightTimes | Spring 2012
play with a ball,” Mengert says. “Frank Kaley and Bob Chambers decided they wanted to start a debate team to accumulate more points toward the literary trophy,” he remembers. “The region debate tournament and the one-act play were the two main point getters.” The men told Mengert to field a debate team and bring home the region trophy. “While I could direct a play, I had no experience or knowledge of debate,” Mengert says. So he and fellow English teacher ANN BOUTWELL quickly recruited the most outstanding students from their classes, learned all they could about the sport, and gave it their best shot in the subregion competition. “We really didn’t know what was going on,” Mengert says. “We just read the rules. But we had some very smart kids.” The team finished first at the sub-region level and second at regionals, but that wasn’t good enough for the notoriously competitive Mengert. “I decided, next year, we were going to win,” he says. So Mengert enlisted the help of one of the top debate coaches in the city, Ted Wolf. Wolf was a former Emory debater and the head coach at North Springs High School. He and his students worked with Pace’s new
Coach George Mengert
team and emphasized the importance of entering multiple tournaments throughout the year—not just the region and state competitions. They encouraged Pace debaters to enroll in summer workshops at universities like Emory, Georgetown and Harvard to develop their skills. The team took Wolf’s advice to heart, and DIANE BAKER ’73, JULIA DOWDA ’73, MARIE HUFFMASTER ’73 and MIKE PINKERTON ’75, competing as a four-man team, won the class A region and state competitions in 1973. “It was a wonderful experience, those very early stages of the debate program,” Baker remembers. Now an attorney at Baker Law Group in Roswell, Ga., she was Pace’s