Sherry Hall is the director of the University of Houston Honors Debate Workshop and an assistant
coach of the University of Houston Debate Team.
With a lifelong dedication to debate coaching, Hall served as a debate coach at Harvard
University for 36 years. She maintains an active presence in the high school forensics
community, where she has taught at numerous summer debate camps and directed the Harvard
National Invitational Forensics Tournament from 1988 to 2023. Since 1981, she has
been involved with high school summer debate workshops, initially as an instructor
and later as a director. Hall founded and directed the Harvard Debate Council Summer
Workshops from 2011 through 2023. She brings her wealth of experience to the University
of Houston to create and direct the UH Honors Debate Workshop.
Hall distinguished herself as one of the top college NDT debate coaches. During her
tenure at Harvard, she coached two NDT Champions, one CEDA Champion, two ADA Varsity
Champions, two Copeland Award winners, two NDT top-speakers, and the "Debater of the
Decade" for the 2000s. Additionally, teams she coached won every college tournament
in the varsity division at least once. Hall was named the Ross K. Smith Coach of the
Year in 2005 and received the Toni Nielson "Best of Forensics" Coach Award in 2014.
She was also recognized as the "Nicest Person in Debate" by the Redlands tournament
in 1995. Moreover, she was acknowledged as one of the top five debate coaches for
the decades from 1990-1999 and 2000-2009, as well as one of the top five judges for
the 1990s.
Active in service to the broader college debate community, Hall served for seventeen
years on the Board of Trustees for the NDT, where she held the position of Treasurer
and assisted in hosting the National Debate Tournament during those years. She spearheaded
efforts to improve the treatment of women in the activity, beginning with a grassroots
movement in the 1980s to encourage tournament directors, program directors, and high
school debate workshops to develop ways to make debate a more welcoming environment
for women. Her efforts culminated in the decades-long endeavor to draft and pass an
anti-harassment policy for the National Debate Tournament. Additionally, she created
the Healthy Debate Initiative in the early 2000s to advocate for more humane tournament
practices in terms of hours and food offerings. This initiative, along with her gender
inclusivity initiative, had an impact on both high school speech and debate tournaments
and the college community. Her service was recognized at the National Debate Tournament where she was awarded
the Lucy Keele Award for Outstanding Service to the Community in 2024.