Members of Northwood’s Speech and Debate team competed in the Orange County Speech League preliminary qualifying competition on March 2-3 at the California State University, Long Beach.
Fourteen students advanced to the California High School Speech Association State Championship, which will be held in-person from April 12-14.
“Our team is all student-run,” speech captain senior Hanmo Yang said. “Learning to collaborate, share resources and put myself out there is definitely something I’ve learned from my experience in the Speech and Debate Club.”
The preliminary competition lasted nine hours with students participating in several rounds of competition as the judges tracked each competitor’s wins and losses to select winners to move on to the next round.
To prepare for this tournament, club members, with support from their respective event captains, practiced their oral delivery, conducted research and strengthened their arguments during weekly meetings outside of school hours.
Event captains also incorporated team bonding activities to help create a safe environment for learning and collaboration.
“The whole Speech and Debate Club is a bunch of very talkative people, so it’s not really hard to create a lot of team chemistry,” debate president senior Anika Akshantala said. “At our prep sessions, the whole team gets together at one of the captains’ homes over pizza and soda to talk about and mentally prepare for upcoming tournaments.”
Speech and Debate competitions offer a wide variety of events, including impromptu, original oratory, dramatic interpretation and informative speech as well as parliamentary debate, public forum debate, policy debate, Lincoln-Douglas debate and congressional debate. New debate topics are released monthly by the National Speech & Debate Association.
Preparing and participating in tournaments is challenging for both experienced and novice competitors, but the supportive community that Northwood’s Speech and Debate Club has created for all of its members has helped foster teamwork and encouragement.
“This was my first time competing in the state qualifiers as a high schooler, and the club captains were really helpful for practicing my speech and working on my inflections and my body language,” club member freshman Amber Chih said. “I’m really excited to compete at the state championship since it’s our last tournament with the whole team.”
