Low-income racial/ethnic-minority youth in under-resourced school contexts have certain opportunities to acquire institutionally-valued cultural capital. I use observational data from six months of debate practices and competitions with two teams in the Chicago Debate League, as well as interviews with twelve debaters and two coaches, to show that debate participation can contribute to participants' acquisition of two forms of cultural capital. Specifically, I document how debaters develop dominant cultural capital in the form of building comfort in demanding critical feedback and analyzing complex ideas. I further demonstrate how debaters develop "adaptive cultural capital": cultural capital which dominant institutions demand of them, but which is not required of members of dominant social groups. Here, adaptive cultural capital is illustrated through debaters' ability to face failure with resilience. These findings presented in this paper contribute to sociological understandings of how schools influence students' acquisition of diverse forms of cultural capital. [This paper was published in "American Journal of Education" v126 n2 p293-321 2020 (EJ1240227).]