Instead, the former high school debaters conduct most of their coaching through video conferencing. And five times this year, Nebel has flown across the country to coach his team in person. Greenhill, which has one of the top debate programs in the country, hired Nebel after he thrived as a competitor at Trinity Preparatory School in Florida, while Palos Verdes brought Chen on board to jumpstart their fledgling team.
Both coach Lincoln-Douglas (LD) debate, a style in which debaters alternate between supporting and opposing a “resolution” on the moral implications of a statement about policy. The resolution changes every two months, and the current topic is “Resolved: In the United States, the principle of jury nullification is a just check on government.”
Greenhill head coach Aaron Timmons, who has been coaching there for 17 years, recruited Nebel as an assistant coach after Nebel won several LD tournaments during high school. Timmons said Nebel’s skill first came to his attention during Nebel’s sophomore year of high school. Timmons first contacted Nebel early in 2009, and Nebel began to officially coach for Greenhill at the beginning of the academic year.
In his senior year, Nebel finished second at the National Forensic League National Tournament and was a semifinalist at the Tournament of Champions, another national championship. Nebel will fly to his sixth tournament to coach Greenhill at the Tournament of Champions this April.
“He knows how to win, basically, and any time you can have someone who’s been through those academic battles — and there are few, if any, who have had the success that he had over a four-year period — [to work] with your students, that’s certainly a perk,” Timmons said.
Nebel said his work involves coordinating research and helping find evidence for the team, as well as giving students advice to improve their speaking styles.
“We communicate a lot by e-mail, phone — they’ll send me videotaped drills on iChat or something like that. I review them later and then give them a call and give them feedback,” Nebel said.
Chen’s team, founded last year, has only two freshmen. Palos Verdes coach Samantha Weiss said she founded the team at the request of one of her students, after he competed on a nationally ranked middle school parliamentary debate team.
“He came to me at the end of eighth grade and said, ‘I really want to do LD,’ ” Weiss explained. “I feel like somebody with that kind of a brain deserves an outlet for it.”
Weiss said she found Chen online after deciding to find a coach with more debate experience.
“It became really obvious that [the students] needed somebody really conversant in that style of debating, so we looked on lddebate.org, and they found a couple names,” Weiss said. “He’s been awesome, really helping them.”
Nebel and Chen explained that much of their work goes on before tournaments, when they help the students research and practice. When their teams are competing, Nebel said, he either attends in person or is “on call” to answer questions, discuss strategies or help students defend against unfamiliar arguments.
While Nebel is only one member of his team’s coaching staff, Weiss said that though she arranges for her team’s practices and tournament participation, Chen provides most of the advice and training.
“I don’t feel like I could do them justice at this point,” Weiss said. “In terms of really getting them rounded in the strategy, that’s all got to come through David.”
Since their teams practice and compete far from Princeton, Nebel and Chen coach mainly online. Chen said that never seeing his students in person is “really strange, having spent a lot of time working with them.”
While Nebel was a high school competitor through June 2009, he transitioned to working as a coach even before taking his job at Greenhill. In June and July, he taught at debate camps in California and Texas.
Nebel said that though coaching debate forces him to get more work done during the week, the skills and habits learned while coaching have actually helped his academic performance at the University.
“It all balances out, because knowing debate stuff — the skills, the research — and, especially, viewing arguments and academic work from the perspective of a coach rather than a debater has really made work for school so much easier,” Nebel said. “I’ve gotten much more efficient at other things because of skills I’ve acquired through debate and specifically through coaching.”
While both Nebel and Chen are compensated for their work, they said their own dedication to debate motivates them to stay involved.
“What I’m dedicated to is teaching and making debate better nationally,” Nebel said. “I think that everyone should do debate. I think that it makes people smarter. I think that it makes people better thinkers. I think that it makes people better researchers. Some people don’t learn that until they graduate from college, if at all.”
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