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Ryan and Elijah make it to the finals of the debate tournament and are up against Northwestern.

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Should the federal government of the United States increase incentives for alternate forms of energies?

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The two are supposed to debate on why the United States should increase incentive for the use of solar energy and restrict coal/fossil fuels.

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The two choose not to talk about the topic at hand but rather about home and if it can be found in debate.

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Ryan references the film, "The Wiz", an all-black cast of The Wizard of Oz to begin his argument about the new topic they have chosen to make the focal point.

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Peyton and Arjun are arguing against Peyton and Elijah. One of their main focuses were that the two should stay on topic.

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Topicality is not stated in the rules to be followed.

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The two teams go back and forth and this results in a tight vote between all the judges. The affirmative side was able to argue about a topic that is completely divergent from the topic given while the negative team argued close to the topic but also made counterarguments to the affirmative.

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Elijah and Ryan win with a 3-2 vote Emporia-Northwestern.

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Ryan's win was monumental in that there has never been a black team that had gotten that far before and won the competition. The Louisville Method received both praise and backlash.

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Harris was one of the judges who gave the decisive vote to Emporia and did so because even though they challenged the topic, their argument was better than what could have been done the traditional way.

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A lot of teams withdrew because they did not think Emporia's style of debate was appropriate. Some went to create their own competitions.

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The Louisville method allowed Emporia to compete with highly funded private institutions.

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It challenged the traditional view on debates and opened many to different ways of winning debates.

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It nearly ruined the traditional style of debate.

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The next year another team of two black women made it through to the final with a similar performance-style debate.

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Debate has been the story of Harris' life so the two talking about the significance of debate in a personal way must have connected with Scott much better than a traditional debate could have.

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In the final speech, Ryan says it war a blur but he does remember talking from the soul and his passion must have played a huge part in bringing the crowd into the debate.

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With the backlash of his method of winning, Ryan felt he had been an anomaly.

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The Louisville style of debate challenged the structure of debate. It helped Emporia, with limited funding, to be able to compete at the highest level of competition with universities such as Yale and Northwestern. Overall, there was backlash but it allowed progress to be made in the debate scene for black debaters.