Overlake Speech and Debate
There are so many activities going on at Overlake that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of them all. Today, we hope to highlight one of Overlake’s exciting extracurricular teams — Speech and Debate. With this article, we hope to answer some of our community’s questions:
What is Speech and Debate? What is it like? Should I join?
Let’s dive in. First up, what do students do in Speech and Debate?
Team Events
One of the current captains of Speech and Debate, Rohan Ganesh, gave us an overview of all the different events.
“One of the things I really love about speech and debate is that there’s so many different events to choose from. You can split between speech events or debate events, which is pretty much in the name. Speech events are more individual-based events, and rather than competing against other people, they’re about you creating the best speech possible and having the best presentation possible. Some of the events involve creating your own 10-minute speech about a problem in society or creating a presentation with poster boards about random interesting topics that you really like. There’s a huge variation. Some of the more interesting events also include things like interpretation events — they’re called dramatic interpretation, humorous interpretation, and duo interpretation. Those events are kind of like drama events, where you pick out an existing script from the internet, movies, or books, and you work on presenting it in a way that’s funny and entertaining.”
Rohan highlights that, “There’s something really great about the speech events where you can add a personal flair to your speeches and speaking style that you don’t really have in debate. We encourage pretty much everyone to do at least one speech event, and there’s events for everyone to do, ranging from unprepared ones to prepared ones.”
Moving on to the debate events, Rohan describes them as “a bit more competitive. There are three types of debate events, which are Congress, Public Forum, and Lincoln Douglas. The way debate events work is that you go to tournaments and you compete with other people, and we spend a lot of time practicing speaking, practicing skills to make the judge vote for you, practicing how to research topics. With debate, you really have to put in a lot of work, but ultimately, they’re really fun events. My personal favorite event out of all the speech and debate events is public forum debate.”
What’s New?
Coach Robin Monteith, who is in her third year of coaching, speaks to some of the changes Speech and Debate has seen. “We have grown in numbers, but we’ve also grown in organization. There are more leadership opportunities, there’s a more formal process for being in those positions. If we have at least a handful of students competing in a category, we can also have squad leaders, which are students that are in charge of leading certain competitive categories. We’re split up into lots of different rooms at each practice because we have lots of different competitive categories, and since we can’t be in all the rooms at the same time, there are lots of students who gain teaching experience because they teach each category in addition to the fact that they get their own competitive experience.”
She also mentions that busy Overlake students, especially athletes, can still take part in Speech and Debate. “There is a core of students right now who might be doing fall sports and will join us after fall sports, there are students that might be in Speech and Debate fully now, but go out during basketball.”
Tournaments
We also asked about the famous debate tournaments. That’s when debate members take a weekend to meet with debate teams from other schools and compete in their respective events. Anish Chaudhuri, a current senior, describes the excitement of tournaments. “On Fridays, we’d always come to school, either we would change into our formal attire the day of, at lunch, or we’d just come to school in them and everyone would ask ‘Hey, what’s going on?’, and it would be exceptionally fun. We’d be on the bus from say, 2:45 onwards, and we’d arrive at a school and then you would immediately connect with, not just members of your own debate team, but with members from other debate teams, test out the waters, and see what’s going on.”
Things have been a bit different with the onset of the pandemic as tournaments have moved online, but the team remains optimistic that they may be competing in-person again soon.
So, how can Overlakers support? Coach Robin acknowledges that it is more difficult for Overlakers to support Speech and Debate compared to sports. “With soccer,” she says, “there’s this big open field and you can sit in the bleachers and support. With Speech and Debate, individual students are spread out all over a school campus in individual rooms, so it’s a little bit harder to spectate, although sometimes possible. I think the best way to show support for Speech and Debate students is to wish them luck before the competition and ask them how they did after the competition from our campus. When we do get back in-person, it is possible, for some people if they’re interested, to come and sit in some rounds when people compete.”
Global Knowledge
Annie Chen and Musab Chummun, both current juniors who joined Speech and Debate in 9th grade, feel that it has helped them to gain more knowledge about the world. Annie mentions that one of her favorite things about Speech and Debate is, “learning more about the world, especially about topics I’m interested in. For example, this year, I’m planning to do a speech about the progression of queens, like female royals, and feminism and how they affect each other.” Musab also talked about one of his favorite speeches, which was a 10-minute rehearsed speech about Islamophobia and how the media exacerbates it. He says that, “I think I have become more politically aware, in the sense that I do so much research on current events that my opinion on a lot of different things has, kind of, matured and I now know a lot more things than I used to know, and I think that’s really important for the political climate right now.” Anish also feels that debate has given him a better sense of who he is and what his interests are, “I feel I’ve discovered that I’m a person who loves to research, and this has also shifted my overall outlook because research is not something just limited to debate, it’s something I plan to take forward in whatever field I go into, including computer science.”
Gaining Important Skills
Many of these members feel that debate has really changed them, beyond just helping them to gain more public speaking skills. For Annie, who was a new freshman to Overlake, debate helped her to fit into the community, “I was such an introvert coming into Overlake. For people that are close to me, I am an extrovert, but for most people, I am just this very, quiet little person that just exists, but now I’m definitely more of an extrovert and more confident. Debate definitely allowed me to open up myself.” Cat Walker, a current junior, agrees, sharing that debate helped to challenge her and make her a better person today, “Debate has definitely challenged me to be more open and to be ok with making mistakes, which is an important skill in life, and it has also helped me to work on my public speaking and my argumentation.”
As one of the leaders of debate, senior Luke Torrey highlights how Speech and Debate improves overall communication. “I think above all else, the number one skill that Speech and Debate provides for its members is the ability to have civil discourse with people who you may disagree with. Speech and Debate encourages and creates informed citizens that engage politically not only with their peers, but also with themselves, to understand what they believe in and what they’re interests are. If you want to apply it to school, things like research and being able to know what a credible source is and apply that to classrooms. But it also provides critical thinking skills and to go deeper than you normally would, to go below the surface of an issue.”
A Tight-Knit Community
But wait… there’s more! Besides gaining skills in communication and argumentation, Rohan wanted to highlight the community Speech and Debate creates. “A big thing that I want all Speech and Debate members to really get out of it is a new community that they build. That’s one of the misconceptions about Speech and Debate, that it just has a really competitive nature, and you just compete in tournaments and do a bunch of work and that’s it, but really, Speech and Debate is a good community that you’ll have throughout your high school years if you join it. You really meet a lot of friends, you become closer with friends at your own school, you meet people from other schools, and you really get closely connected with the activity.”
The community that Rohan described is something all of our interviewees wanted to emphasize. Anish says, “My favorite part of Speech and Debate was my partnership with Rohan. During the evening, we’d work up late, maybe to 2 am, though I wouldn’t encourage that for future practitioners. That was a good partnership, and it still continues to be in a friendship sense and a mentoring sense.” Cat feels very strongly about clearing up the misunderstanding of Speech and Debate as a cutthroat environment, “I think something I want to emphasize is a lot of the time when I talk to people and they learn I do Speech and Debate they say, ‘Oh, that’s so scary! I could never join.’ But I promise, we are just the silliest group of people and it’s not scary. We are very welcoming, it’s a fun time, and you should definitely join.” Musab agrees, “The community itself is so fun to be around and the energy is unmatchable.”
Should You Join?
To round out our investigation, we asked our interviewees to give some advice to those thinking about joining. To anyone on the fence, Anish’s advice is clear, “Join it. The reason is: Speech and Debate will teach you a lot of things, and that’s not just the cliched how to speak publicly, but it will also help you foster a community with other schools, other members, and despite there being certain tensions between teams, what you’re going to find is the ability to collaborate and the ability to create an environment in which you can personally feel that you have contributed to a large set of ideas that do have implications in the real world.”
Musab agrees, “Just try it out. There’s so many different kinds of debate and speech events, why not come try, you know? I think a life lesson right now is that you should try something, and then, if you like it, you like it, but if you don’t, you’ll never know. I just randomly decided to join debate, and look where I am now — it’s my biggest extracurricular and hobby.”
Rohan hoped to leave prospective members with these last thoughts, “Speech and debate is not all about arguments. I know debate kind of sounds daunting, but really, a lot of it is about speaking and even just thinking up really good ways to phrase things. So, even if you’re not an argumentative person, there’s always events for you. You can always do speech events, you can still find ways to do certain debate events. Also, if you’re not an argumentative person, if you’re not a great speaker, then you should still join because it’s a good opportunity to get better, and to open yourself up, and to really improve these skills. It’s definitely my favorite activity that I’ve ever done, and I’m gonna hold it close to my heart for the rest of my life.”
