This past Christmas week I returned to Pittsburgh to take my parents to see "The Great Debaters," the new Denzel Washington and Oprah Winfrey film about a college debate team from Marshall, Texas. Although the cost of this gift was inexpensive by conventional standards, it was priceless to me.

The film, which has generated considerable buzz and justifiable acclaim, is inspired by the true story of the 1935 Wiley College debate team, its legendary coach, Melvin B. Tolson, and his most famous student, James L. Farmer Jr.

Mr. Farmer, an often overlooked giant of the civil rights movement, was the principal architect of the strategy of nonviolent protest, the leader of the Freedom Rides and the founder of the Congress for Racial Equality, among other things. His many contributions were only belatedly recognized when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1998, just a year before his death.

But "The Great Debaters" isn't really a story about Mr. Farmer, although he is central to its retelling and his is a story that will need to be told on a future occasion. Instead, it is a story that pivots around Mr. Tolson, one of the greatest debate coaches in American history, whose African-American teams went on a 10-year winning streak. Many of their victories were earned in interracial debates pitting segregated colleges against each other at a time when practically everything interracial was prohibited by law.

Mr. Tolson is one of my heroes because I, too, am a debate coach. I've looked up to him since I first read about his accomplishments several years ago in his protege's autobiography, "Lay Bare the Heart." The book is a must-read at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., where I have worked for most of the last decade and where Mr. Farmer taught during the last 13 years of his life.

Debate has been my life. Although my interscholastic and intercollegiate debate careers were unremarkable by championship standards, I've since had the good fortune as a coach to work with some of the greatest high school and college debaters in the country. For me, this journey began more than a quarter century ago on the North Side at a long-since-vanished parochial school when my mother gently informed me that I had a better chance of being successful at debate than at football. (She had watched me play on the grade-school team.)

Growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, I of course considered playing for the Steelers a far more glorious destination for a seventh grader than anything that could be accomplished by joining a debate team. Nevertheless, I took her advice and I am all the better for it.

By 1984, when it came time to decide where I would go to high school, I was, to borrow Malcolm X's phrase, "gone on debating." To this day, I vividly remember pleading with my parents to take on the considerable expense of sending me to North Catholic High School over Perry Traditional Academy because the school on Troy Hill had a debate team, while the one on Perry Hilltop did not.

Through the years, I have been blessed to have had many Mr. Tolsons in my life -- people who have inspired me in unimaginable ways. Most have their roots in Pittsburgh. The first was my father -- he was my sparring partner and the dinner table was our stage for much of my youth. Beth Young, the long-time coach at North Catholic High School and my first real coach, taught me, better than anyone, that "to communicate is to begin to understand."

In a moment of serendipity during my junior year of high school, I had the good fortune of being judged by William Evans, a North Hills High School graduate and now a professor of economics at the University of Maryland. He was a strong advocate for my admission to Wake Forest University, itself a remarkable place and an unparalleled leader in the intercollegiate debate community. Similarly, Brett O'Donnell (no relation), was a judge and mentor from Penn State who went on to build not only the perennially top-ranked Liberty University team, but also a nationally recognized Penn State team.

Years earlier, another North Hills debater, John Graham, blazed the trail to Wake Forest and catapulted that program to the top of the national rankings in the late 1970s. After directing the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and working as a top official in the Office of Management and Budget, Mr. Graham is now dean at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and remains one of debate's true champions.

Gordon Mitchell, a Sewickley Academy graduate who went on to be the top college debater in the country during his senior year and who has for many years been the director of debate at the University of Pittsburgh, convinced me to eschew the legal profession for a more rewarding career in education as I was about to sign up for the law school admissions test.

I write this all to say that there was a time when Central and Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh in particular, was one of the epicenters of the interscholastic debate universe. I was a product and beneficiary of that time. There were many others like me, and all of us profited from the tireless dedication of the region's many fine debate coaches.

Those days are no more and the epicenter has moved elsewhere. This is not to say that academic debate has vanished from the Pittsburgh scene, but it is undoubtedly diminished.

And so, while my Christmas gift to my parents is to say thank you for making a career in debate possible for me through your many sacrifices and endless nurturing, my Christmas wish for Pittsburgh and the surrounding region is that local leaders take the opportunity occasioned by "The Great Debaters" to consider seriously the role that academic debate might have in revitalizing school systems in Western Pennsylvania. It takes commitment, support and an unquenchable thirst for excellence to do so, but it is both possible and worthwhile.

If the inspirational triumph of the long-forgotten Wiley College debate team and the proud history of debate in the Pittsburgh region are unconvincing, then the true and contemporary story of the nation's many Urban Debate Leagues leaves little doubt. Curriculum centered around debate is rapidly transforming many of the nation's inner cities, and it could do the same for the place that I always will call home.