Four Bathurst High Campus students - Machayla Hayes, Thomas Brennan-Newton, Olivia Daley and Samuel Blencowe - were the negative team, arguing on the topic 'the Olympics are important' against Orange High School on Thursday morning.

Bathurst High senior debating coach Jess Luchetti said it was a close battle between the two schools.

"For the Mulvey Cup, the home team is the affirmative team and the away team is the negative. That automatically put us in the negative position," she said.

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"I think it was a really tricky topic, especially to debate the negative side of that topic. They did a really nice job to persuade the adjudicator our way.

"Overall, it was a really close debate between Orange and Bathurst and it really could've gone either way."

The four students were given only an hour to prepare their debate, only finding out the topic on the day.

"The way it works is that the students are given four envelopes and the away team gets to chose from the envelope, for the topic of the day," Ms Luchetti explained.

"Each team gets three topics in that envelope and they have to order them one, two and three. One being the one they want to debate the most and three the one they'd like to debate the least.

"After they decide on the topic, they go away and have an hours prep time. There's no devices, laptops or phones. They only had a dictionary and their brains."

While winning any debate is a great feeling, defeating Orange High in the Mulvey Cup is even better.

"It felt absolutely amazing," Ms Luchetti said.

"It actually accumulates to our Astley Cup points. That's really awesome for them to be participating and gaining points for the Astley Cup as well, for the school spirit."

Bathurst High will welcome Dubbo College to town on June 29-30 for the final round of the Astley Cup and the Mulvey Cup.

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