Sophomores Destiny Hale and Hanna Sharkarov brought home a trophy for Wake Forest Debate at the 2025 ACC Debate Championship after defeating Southern Methodist University on April 27 in Washington, D.C., at the Wake Washington Center. This win represents Wake Forest’s fifteenth ACC Debate Championship victory.
Wake Forest had to debate in four preliminary rounds against randomly selected opponents before defeating SMU in the championship. Hale and Sharkarov were undefeated in these preliminary debates against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Florida State University, University of Miami and Notre Dame.
The debate topic was “Resolved: Washington D.C. should be granted statehood.” The two teammates used their combined knowledge to win the final round.
“[Hale and Sharkarov] were able to meld together arguments from economics, political science, sociology and communication studies to beat a very talented team from SMU,” said Jarrod Atchinson, director of debate at Wake Forest. “The win reflects one of the core strengths of Wake Forest Debate, which benefits greatly from our university’s commitment to engaged liberal arts that defy academic silos and helps prepare our students to debate extremely complicated topics.”
Sharkarov expressed that the tournament was challenging, but not out of reach for this team.
“Our judges represented an extremely wide variety of backgrounds, preferences and experiences within the debate space and outside of us,” Sharkarov said. “This posed a challenge, as Destiny and I had to adapt not only our content, but our performance and tactics to adapt to each judge. This is also, to be honest, my favorite part of debate.”
In addition to winning the championship, Hale was voted the top overall speaker, and Sharkarov was voted the second overall speaker.
“The most rewarding part was easily seeing [Hale] and my endless hours of research and practice rounds culminating into a championship,” Sharkarov said.
