Selections for Indonesia's WSDC 2012 Team Begins Today

The Ministry of Education has invited 24 high school students from all over the country to join the selection process to get 4 debaters who will represent Indonesia in the 2012 World Schools Debating Championships. The trials begin today at Jakarta's Wisma Subud and they are aimed at selecting Team Indonesia before the November 18 deadline. The next WSDC will take place in Cape Town, South Africa from January 17 to 27.

Indonesia has broken twice into the WSDC knockouts, in 2003 and 2004, with a nearly identical line-up. No other Indonesian team has advanced from the preliminaries. Debaters and coaches of those two successful teams will take part as judges in today's trials.

The coach for the upcoming Team Indonesia is M. Subarkah Syafruddin whose Universitas Indonesia team won the ESL category in the 2011 Australasian Inter-Varsities Debating Championships in Seoul. Sume, as he is affectionately known, has a tough task ahead. He needs to form a solid team from scratch while several nations have decided to use debaters who competed in the 2011 WSDC last August as the backbone of their Cape Town squads.