Head Coach
Julie Herman (pictured with Los Altos DH) is the director of the Mountain View-Los Altos district Speech and Debate Team. As a high school student, she competed in parliamentary debate and impromptu, continuing her parli career at Santa Clara University. There, she learned to coach Lincoln-Douglas, Public Forum, Extemp, and Original Oratory. Before taking the lead position at MVLA in 2015, she led the MVLA Parli squad MVLA (2011-2014), was Head Coach at Prospect High School (2012-2014), and worked as lecturer for several other camps, academies, and workshops. Students trained by her have been champions at the CHSSA State Tournament, Parliamentary Debate Tournament of Champions, Stanford Tournament, and Yale Tournament (to name a few) and have qualified to the NSDA National Tournament. Although her students have graduated and gone on to attend prestigious universities, including UCLA, UC Berkeley, U Chicago, and Yale, she spends a lot of time telling them that it's not the fanciness of the university that counts but how right it makes you feel. Julie is excited to pass on her experience of speech and debate as family to students in the MVLA district.
Executive Team
Assistant Coaches
Former Head Coach Teri Young and former MVLA competitor Zoe Morgan (LA'14) act as Assistant Coaches to Ms. Herman.
Zoe (pictured) is a former MVLA student who competed in Lincoln-Douglas and Parliamentary debate. Her senior year, she was named an Academic All American. As an undergraduate at American University, Zoe competed in the American Parliamentary Debate League. She was 15th Speaker of the Year and 16th Team of the Year. She helps with general administration, as well as LD coaching.
Mrs. Young (not pictured) is a community volunteer, former debater, and coach, who assists with with web development and administration.
Student Executive Team
The 2019-2020 Student Executive Team is Jiayan Luo (President, LA'20), Angelina Lue (VP, LA'21), Amelie Sen (VP, MV'20), and Ben Falkenberg (Secretary, LA'21).
Booster Board
Our current booster members are Ed Lingo (President), Priya Sundar (Treasurer), and Rich Liu (Secretary)
Lincoln-Douglas
Coaches
Our LD coaches are Zoe Morgan and Pearlin Liu.
Pearlin is a former competitor for Notre Dame High School's speech and debate team. She has competitive experience in Parliamentary Debate, Lincoln Douglas, Original Oratory, Oratorical Interpretation, Dramatic Interpretation, and Duo Interpretation and has coached students in multiple debate formats, platform speech events, interpretation speech events, and limited-prep events. She strongly believes in the power speech and debate has to equip students with the necessary tools to succeed in life.
Captains
Our LD captains are Amelie Sen (Lay LD, MV'20), Arjun Patrawala (Lay LD, MV'21), and Parth Dhanotra (Circuit LD, LA'20)
Mentoring
Parliamentary
Coaches
Our Parliamentary Debate coaches are Sierra Maciorowski, Steven Herman, and Shirley Cheng (LA'18).
Sierra debated for Sonoma Academy in high school, where she finished the 2014-2015 season ranked #10 individually in Parliamentary debate, reaching finals at NPDI and quarters at the Tournament of Champions. During a gap year, she competed in British Parli while in Europe, and for the Santa Rosa Junior College in NPDA Parli, ending her NPDA career ranked #21 nationally. In 2015, Sierra started her coaching career with private students and middle-schoolers at Sonoma Country Day School, and she serves as a director and instructor for the middle and high school programs at the POI Debate Institute. Her students have both qualified to and won the Parli Tournamnt of Champions and the Parli division at the CHSSA state tournament. A senior at Stanford, she enjoys travelling, reading, and hiking, and spends most of her free time taking pictures of her experimental cupcake recipes.
Steven debated parli for MVLA in high school, finishing both the 2015-2016 and 2014-2015 season ranked first, reaching finals at TOC both years. With Spencer Dembner, his team was the Parli Champions at the 2015 Stanford Invitational and at the SCU Dempsey Cronin. Continuing in college, he won the 2017 SCU Copeland Invitational and competed at nationals. Steven started coaching his freshman year for Notre Dame High School and is an instructor for the SCU Summer Workshop. He has qualified multiple students to the Parli TOC. As a Senior Computer Engineering major at Santa Clara, he enjoys backpacking, computer programming, and playing games.
Captains
Our Parliamentary debate captains are Angelina Lue (LA'20) and Henry Shi (LA'20).
Mentoring
Our Parliamentary debate mentorship coordinator is Kiefer Tierling (LA'21).
Public Forum
Our Public Forum Debate coaches are Michael Wu (LA'15) and Sanjim Uppal.
Michael debated for the MVLA team from 2012-2015. Competing in Congressional debate, he served as co-captain of the congress team during the 2014-2015 school year. He took first place in Congressional debate at the 2013 Fall SCU tournament. During his senior year, he began debating in public forum, advancing to the quarterfinal round at the 2015 Spring SCU tournament. In 2015, Michael started his coaching career with the YFL program at Egan Junior High School, coaching impromptu speech. A recent graduate of Santa Clara University, he enjoys cooking, astronomy, and music, and spends most of his free time watching shows on Netflix.
During her high school debate carreer, Sanjim competed in public forum debate for 4 years at James Logan High School. She is currently a second year student at Ohlone College majoring in cognitive science. She coaches public forum at the Golden State Academy, BASIS Independent Silicon Valley, MVLA, and coached St. Francis High School the year prior. Outside of this, Sanjim has coached teams like Mira Loma GS to success on the national circuit (qualifying, breaking, and autoqualifying to TOC, all for the first time), along with Mission San Jose DD (silver bid leaders), and has also taught at the Victory Briefs Institute.
Speech
Lilly Hackworth, Kevin Thurber and Pearlin Liu are our speech coaches. You can find Pearlin's bio under "LD"
Lilly coaches Spontaneous speech for MVLA. She debated for Notre Dame San Jose and MVLA in high school, finishing the 2016-2017 season ranked first in parli after winning eleven tournament championships including the Tournament of Champions, Stanford, and SCU. She also competed in impromptu and extemp throughout high school, reaching finals at the CHSSA State Tournament junior year and placing seventh at NSDA Nationals senior year in domestic extemp. In impromptu, she consistently placed in the top two at tournaments such as the Jon Schamber, SCU, and Stephen Stewart Invitationals. She started coaching as an instructor at POI Debate Institute and has since continued private coaching. As a third year at the University of Chicago majoring in computer science and political science, she enjoys running, hiking, and reading in her free time.
Kevin Thurber coaches prepared speeches -- a subset of Individual Events (IEs) -- for CFL competitions. There are about seven categories of speech in this area. Kevin also coaches students for independent club competitions such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the Rotary Club. He had been the head Speech coach at Bishop Marello Preparatory in Santa Cruz, and an assistant Speech coach in the San Jose Unified School District (SJUSD) in the past. Long ago, Kevin was himself a state finalist from the Coast Forensic League (CFL). Kevin is a practicing attorney in Child Dependency and Delinquency law, one of the first 200 attorneys who had qualified nationally as a Child Welfare Law Specialist (CWLS) with the State Bar of California.
