The New Year of Speech and Debate

The Fair Grove Speech and Debate team has the RepMo tournament, their first competition of their season, on November 6th, 2021. They have been practicing after school on Tuesdays to prepare.

The tournament is their first competition of the year and will be hosted in Republic.

The RepMo tournament will have three rounds; most tournaments typically only have two rounds before finals. Each round is a time that you perform for a judge in a different room to be ranked against the fellow performers. The judge in the room will be watching and judging around five or six people total, ranking them within each other.

Cooper Zumwalt, the Speech and Debate President (11), refered to the point system like golf in the sense that you want to have the lowest rank from your judge.

After the first three rounds of performing, they calculate how many points each entry in an event was given. Just like in the rounds, the less points you have the better.

For finals, they will take the top six in each event. Some of these events include humorous interpretation, dramatic interpretation, poetry, prose, informative speeches, duo interpretation, storytelling, and POI. The finalist performers will present their speech to the judges that will rank them like they did during their rounds.

The lowest ranking in every event will be who wins in that event and so on. The winners of each event will get a metal or a trophy to recognize their work for their performances that day.

This tournament is commonly known as a very competitive one. Zumwalt described, “It is a large speech tournament with sometimes up to 70 entries for each event. It’s normally two days long and debate is on Friday, speech and debate are on Saturday. It has both the varsity and novice division.”

The novice division is in place so that new competitors don’t have to go against the more experienced competitors straight away.

Fair Grove Speech and debate team has been preparing for the RepMo tournament with their after school practices on Tuesdays. These practices go until 5-5:30 in Amy Holland’s room, the theatre and speech and debate teacher and sponsor. At these practices they will work on their pieces by working on their expressions and different actions for their pieces. They will work on the pieces individually or with their partners for a duo interpretation.

Nico Jenkins, the Speech and Debate Vice President (10), mentioned that they are working on a duo interpretation with Addison Zittle. They are also working on a POI piece for their solo piece.

Jenkins mentioned that at practices, everyone really works together to provide “…critiques and suggestions to each other’s pieces or performances.”

The speech and debate participants this year have expressed that they are excited for speech and debate to start again. Most of these students are excited to have the in-person aspect of speech back again.