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In 1925, Professor Bruno Jacob at Ripon College founded the NFL—no, not that NFL, but the National Forensic League. He was asked about a national honor society for debaters and decided to create one when he realized one didn’t exist. The original NFL was rebranded to the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) in 2014 to avoid consistent confusion with the sports league that shared its name. It’s beneficial this change was made because speech and debate kids are a lot better at hurling arguments than balls.
This year, the NSDA is celebrating its 100th birthday at the National Speech and Debate tournament in Des Moines, Iowa from June 15th-20th. All team members from our school will be guaranteed three days of competition, and more if students make it to post-preliminary rounds. According to the NSDA website this year at Nationals there are over 6,700 students from 1,500 schools nationwide, while only 42 champions will be crowned at the end of the competition.
Over the history of the national speech tournament, the state of Washington has produced eight national champions with two of these champions hailing from Bellevue school district (Lynne Joyner, Newport high school, in 1976, and Stacey Layton, Interlake high school, in 1984). Aiming to add another Washington champion, the Bellevue Speech and Debate team is sending 18 students to compete this year, a new record for our school.
These 18 students are competing in a total of nine different main events including:
Public Forum Debate: Hailey Samuel, Brooke Bede, Filipe Scorsatto Bothelo, Yash Kothari, Ethan Kuruvilla, and Saveer Sidhu
Congressional Debate: Jiadong Gu, Aarush Vegulla, and Nate Chiang-Lin
Worlds School Debate: Harry Zhao
Lincoln Douglas Debate: James Sun
Extemporaneous Debate: Jacquline Hsaio, Zia Shaikh, and Mingze Shi
Informative Speaking: Elliana Nan
Original Oratory: Angela Zou
Dramatic Interpretation: Meriel Seu
Humorous Interpretation: Madelyne Masters
Bellevue's success wouldn't be possible without the countless hours of encouragement and support from Ms. McCormick, the Speech and Debate advisor. The team is grateful for all of her dedication and motivation.
As Bellevue's Speech and Debate team embarks on their National competition, we wish them all the best and hope the many hours of preparation and competition pay off. Stay tuned for an update on how the team does.
