Justus Aryani is the inaugural Coolidge President's Cup Champion and Assistant Director at Ziggy Online Debate.
He studies Cyber Security at Collin College. He coaches a small number of students per cycle.
- C-01 · COMPETITOR
Justus has competed for eight years across NCFCA, Stoa, IPDA, Coolidge, and Reagan, winning tournament championships in three different formats: Team Policy, Moot Court, and Coolidge debate.
He is the inaugural Coolidge President's Cup Champion, a National Open Champion in Moot Court, and a two-time Team Policy National Quarterfinalist. He began debating at collegiate meets with SMU at sixteen, convinced even then that something was missing in the resources available to his circuit.
- C-02 · BUILDER
That conviction made him a builder. Before he had even graduated, Justus kept a waitlist of students he coached as a volunteer, from beginners to competitors stalled at a plateau.
He co-created and maintained the Openness Project and the National Caselist, a student-led push for debate transparency that brought hundreds of teams across 12 regions and 50 states into the open. Iron sharpening iron. He went further and launched the National Prep Group, a free, nationwide research ring built to make skill-sharing and access to competitive briefs a standard rather than a privilege. His debate guides and research have been published through Monument Publishing and Rhetoric LLC.
In 2024 Justus became Assistant Director and Tech Lead at Ziggy Online Debate, an online tournament host and sponsor organization serving more than 2,000 students with over a million dollars in scholarships offered.
He has helped Ziggy reach record registrations, launch new tournament formats, start a student guidebook, sign new sponsors, and draw international students from five countries and their leagues. The next step is the largest: software solutions at scale for civic educators, emerging debate nonprofits, clubs, tournaments, and leagues, arriving in 2026.
- C-03 · MISSION
After being crowned a Coolidge Champion, Justus joined the Coolidge Presidential Foundation, first helping out as an 1890 Society member and event staffer before accepting an offer to intern for the Foundation and help build their debate program from the inside.
Even after moving to Germany, he still commutes to serve one of the fastest-growing debate initiatives in the country, one committed to dialogue over division. Coolidge is building one of the most serious tools there is against polarization and populism: intentional, respectful debate spaces. He is proud to be part of it.
At seventeen, Justus was gifted a copy of "Debate as a Global Pedagogy: Rwanda Rising." It became the work that defined what he believes debate is for, and the catalyst for Meridian's global civic-education conviction.
Through Meridian, those roots take full seed. Justus is beginning to work with international partners to remove the financial, logistical, and educational barriers to civic education programs, turning years of informal system-building into one organized effort.
- B-01 · AS A COACH
Justus has coached novices and national finalists alike, and his focus is the same for both: moving each student from where they are to where they want to be.
He specializes in case construction, strategy, and argument architecture, the underlying structures and first principles that generate every technique a debater will ever use. He brings concrete theory and real-world understanding to public discourse.
He does not believe in systems without people. Coaching a student into a mold wastes their single greatest asset, their own ability to relate to an audience. Justus builds the structure, then teaches each debater to deploy it in a voice that is unmistakably their own.
- B-02 · PHILOSOPHY
- First principles before technique.
- Structure is what scales.
- Dialogue over division.
- Iron sharpens iron.
“Learning from someone more experienced really paid off. Your framework approach, setting up what we need to prove and then anchoring every contention back to it, is insane. We went 6-1 at a local Public Forum tournament. The format and skills I picked up from you made all the difference.”