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Meet the Students Who Speak Publicly… For Fun

McClatchy has had a successful speech and debate team for years. Our debate team qualifies for the National Championship Tournament and our speech team makes it to the Grand National tournament regularly. But if you ask around, not many people seem to know exactly what these teams do.
To understand speech and debate, one must know that the two entities are separate. Speech and debate meetings even occur on different days of the week (Monday and Tuesday, respectively). Though they sometimes compete at the same tournaments and both involve public speaking, there are very distinct differences between the two.
“Speech is an academic competition that offers a variety of events for high school students to compete in. Those events range from improvisational, to competitions of works that students compose themselves, to interpretations that come from dramatic and humorous plays,” says Mark A. Hernandez Sr., the head coach of McClatchy’s speech team and Executive Director of the Sacramento Urban Debate League.
The McClatchy speech team of 6 students tends to specialize in the interpretation events, in which contestants partake in what is essentially competitive acting of 10 minute monologues, though there are those who compete in events like impromptu, where a topic is given two minutes before each speech, and the competitor then must give a 5 minute speech on that topic.
Though events in speech are mostly individual, new and old students alike still feel a close knit and communal bond with their small team. “This is my first time being here, and automatically when I came in I felt accepted in this room,” said Dylan Anderson, a Junior attending his first speech meeting.
“[Speech is] somewhere I can always come and know that I have a home, and it’s something I always look forward to every Monday. It’s a very welcoming, fun community,” said Molly Martin, a senior who has done Speech and Debate all 4 years of high school.
Debate at McClatchy is much larger than speech. The team is growing fast, with around 20 members already. The team has 3 coaches in Sacramento alone, and another based in Washington state. Many of these members come to McClatchy as freshman having debated in middle school. “I did speech and debate in middle school, so I decided to continue doing that here … I heard McClatchy had a really good speech and debate program — it’s one of the only reasons I came here,” said Freshman Eden Getahun.
As with speech, there are many different forms of debate. McClatchy mainly focuses on the form of debate known as policy, which entails “two teams of two discussing different ways to go about a resolution, [and] we have the same topic for the whole school year,” said Molly Martin. The topic usually involves political policy within the United States.This form of debate allows for thorough discussion of the topic from various angles. Often, teams will get creative in round to prove a point, from reading poetry to literally hexing Donald Trump.
CKM debate also includes parliamentary debate, which involves two teams of two debating a topic that was given to them 20 minutes before a round.
Even though work is involved outside of meetings, such as going to tournaments over the weekends, researching, developing and preparing arguments, most say any sacrifice is small in comparison to the benefits of debate, “Debate is really fun, and the sacrifices involved are worth it.” said Sophomore Adrienne Marcin.
Debate is an activity that comes with many benefits, according to much of the team. Of course, there’s the intellectual gain –“It’s a greater understanding of philosophy … things that are less obvious, in terms of a subject at hand. Allowing us to find responses that aren’t so inherently visible.” said Sophomore Ian Keithley.
Then there’s the social gain. “I have a community of friends that I can count on for the rest of my life,” said Molly Martin.
Even though many of us do not know much about speech and debate, it continues to be a quiet powerhouse, consistently attracting talented freshman to our school, and producing outstanding and successful students.

Much of the speech debate teams from the 2016-17 school year. (via Libby Reynolds)