Partnering Up To Win State Speech Competitions

Fair Grove has many exceptional students, among them are Speech Club Duo partners Stephanie Dunham (10) and Cooper Zumwalt (11). These two students will be competing in state level competitions in the coming weeks. 

Cooper Zumwalt has participated in Speech and Debate for five years now, starting out when he was a seventh grade student. Zumwalt has done many different events during his time in speech but his most successful has always been Duo. In fact Zumwalt and his numerous partners have taken first, second, and third at three separate tournaments. 

Duo, being a partner event, means that two people must partner together to participate. This year Zumwalt has partnered up with sophomore Stephanie Dunham. 

Dunham has been a member of Speech and Debate since she was in seventh grade as well. She has participated in many other speech events as well but this year she has been focusing on Duo with Zumwalt. 

When it comes to finding a partner, both Dunham and Zumwalt explained that there must be good chemistry between partners due to having to work closely together for such a significant amount of time. Zumwalt stated, “What made me choose to be a partner with Stephanie is her pure talent and drive to do well. She is a super hard worker and one of my best friends, so it just made sense.”  

Dunham included “Cooper has always been a DUO person, and it’s just a really fun event to do in speech and it really bonds you and your DUO partner together in a special way.” They have both put a lot of work into the piece they chose. 

Zumwalt and Dunham have both spent a lot of time editing and cutting down the length of their specific piece. Zumwalt noted, “To get our performance to where it is, it probably took about a month of cutting down the script, practicing, and making sure everything is polished. We had to practice almost daily in our Speech and Debate class. After we finally got everything hammered out, we stopped practicing quite as often but made sure to make time to clean things up every once and a while.”

“Honestly we did the best that I think we could have done. The only problem was that our piece’s target audience is drama people, and unfortunately at local tournaments the judges are normally not people that know about drama references. So mainly that has been a major roadblock we have been facing this year,” stated Dunham. The number of tournaments that they were able to perform at this year were very few, but it didn’t stop them from working their hardest.