Speech and debate, facing challenges on all fronts, begins to find solutions

Photo by Shreya Rallabandi

Freshmen Caleb Yu, Arsh Tikku, Langdon Huynh and Vivaan Suri review their cases during speech and debate practice on Oct. 1.

The speech and debate team’s year began with officers scrambling to get it back on its feet. 

The first challenge was to find a new advisor and head coach after English teacher Erick Rector stepped down during the summer. 

Rector resigned over what he described as “a philosophical disagreement” with the team’s booster parents.

According to team president senior Harshini Velchamy, the head coach stays with their competitors at weekend-long tournaments and signs students up for tournaments, aside from helping students with their events.

Because Rector was also the club’s adviser, the speech and debate club has had recent struggles with registering and competing in competitions, as one of the roles of the advisor is to represent the program at Coastal Forensics League meetings as a school employee. 

“After coming back from COVID, the speech and debate team was already struggling, so at a time when it seemed that the situation couldn’t get any worse, the loss of the advisor was devastating,” Velchamy said.

Recently the club has found an informal staff adviser: new assistant principal Abra Evanoff.

Steve Clemmons, the team’s debate coach who has been with the program since 2009, has replaced Rector as head coach. The club also recently hired a new speech coach, Kiana Young, who began on Oct. 1.

Currently, Clemmons is the coach for both of the club’s debate teams: one for Lincoln-Douglass (LD), which is an event where students debate individually, and another for Public Forum (PF), an event where students debate in teams of two. Approximately eight students are competing in LD this year, and around 15 are competing in PF. In total, the speech program has around 16 active members.

The hiring of Young is a significant step forward compared to last year’s program, where students were either coached by team captains or sought out private, often expensive coaching.

Recently, SHS Speech and Debate sent one LD team and two PF teams — five students in total — to compete in the Stephen Stewart Middle and High School Invitational from Sept. 24 to Sept. 26. This tournament marks the start of the speech and debate season, which began in August and extends until mid-March.

One of the club’s main challenges this year was underclassmen retention. Last year, students who were completely new to speech and debate were restricted to solely online practices and competition, blocking them from experiencing the full scope of the activity and decreasing overall morale. Clemmons, club officers and event captains are currently manning the large group of underclassmen who are new to the program and hope that this year, in-person practices will encourage retention.

Additionally, funds continue to be a concern; since it cannot mandate registration payments from its members, the club is seeking creative means of fundraising to cover tournament and coaching expenses, among other fees. These expenses run into the thousands of dollars annually.

The team is planning to host the second annual Hyde Invitational for middle schoolers from Oct. 30- 31 as a fundraising event. The tournament, in which middle schoolers nationwide will compete in their respective speech and debate events, will be held online to align with COVID-19 concerns. 

Students on the SHS team will judge individual speech and debate rounds. The club’s treasurer, junior Shreya Rallabandi, and PF captain, junior Anushka Sankaran, are working to garner interest for the tournament and attempting to exceed last year’s numbers of eight schools in attendance.

“We’re trying to take advantage of the fact that Hyde has to be virtual in order to get as much out of this tournament as we can,” Sankaran said. “Not just money wise — we want our club members to be able to gain experience in their own events while judging middle schoolers.”

Speech and debate tournaments will be virtual for the first semester, and it is unclear whether virtual competition will continue on into the second semester. Nevertheless, team members hope to continue their success from last year and be able to give their members an experience as close to a traditional speech and debate experience as possible.

“I’m really excited to see what we can do this year,” Velchamy said. “I think we have a bright future ahead of us.”