Senior places first at state speech tournament, looks forward to nationals

Three seniors will be attending the National Speech and Debate Association’s national tournament taking place from June 17-22 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

To qualify, the students had to place in previous competitions. Divya Rallabandi won first at the California state speech and debate tournament for Oratorical Interpretation (OI) on April 22 and Austin Wang went undefeated in National qualifiers earlier this year. Finally, Kyle Wang qualified as a result of being in last year’s national tournament.

Rallabandi hopes to find more time to prepare than she had for the state competition.

“States is competitive, and there are a lot of talented orators, but nationals is a whole different ball game,” Rallabandi said.

For the national competition, Rallabandi will be participating in a different event. Rather than oratorical interpretation, she will be competing in Program OI because nationals does not offer regular OI as an event.

According to Rallabandi, the events are mostly similar, yet differ in the sources included in the speech presented.

While OI is a performance of a single speech, Program OI requires students to synthesize many different forms of media such as newspapers, books and speeches into a single creative piece.

Although the event Rallabandi will participate in at nationals is different from the one she won in states, she believes the common skill set required will help her.

“Instead of focusing on the technical notes of the speech, such as raising my tone in certain parts, I focused more on the fundamentals,” Rallabandi said. “This is what helped me to win states, and I think this will come in handy during nationals too.”

Entering the last competition of high school, Rallabandi said the biggest lesson she has learned from her four years in speech and debate is to not care so much about the results.

“It’s such a subjective event, so a lot of the judging is out of your control,” Rallabandi said. “That’s why I don’t worry that much.”

Kyle Wang said he expects the competition to be a sentimental ending to four years of debate.

“Now that this is shaping up to be my last tournament, it hasn’t hit me quite yet,” Kyle said. “But it definitely will when I’m giving those last few speeches at nationals.”

Both Kyle and Austin Wang said that it is unlikely for them to participate in speech in debate in college because of the time commitment required, but nationals will be a fitting ending. “I think speech and debate has been a great activity and it has taught me a lot,” Austin said. “I’m excited to put myself to the test in the last tournament.”