National Champions

It certainly feels like championship week with the Boston Bruins capturing the Stanley Cup last night and a title parade set this morning for the NBA’s Mavericks in downtown Dallas. Dirk Nowitzki and his teammates will also pass by hundreds of high school students seeking national titles of their own as the National Forensic League hosts their annual speech and debate championships in Big D. Sadly, while the individual orators and debaters can vie to be recognized as the best in the nation, their schools cannot be recognized in the same way. The NFL abolished their sweepstakes awards – which ranked all the participating teams based on their students’ performance as a group and dubbed a single school the year’s national champion – in October of 1994 at the behest of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

That move has always irked me for a couple of reasons. First, the nature of competitive speech and debate is individualistic. It’s designed very much like track and field, with students offered dozens of ways to express themselves and test their verbal skills. Thus, any coach with an eye for building a sense of team pride faces obstacles in the very activity’s design. The goal of pushing one’s school up the ladder of national rankings, or perhaps even hanging a championship banner from the proverbial rafters, could really help motivate students to support their peers while honing their own craft. Secondly, I’ve yet to see the principals’ association make the same demands of the National Cheerleaders Association or the United States Chess Federation, both of which crown national champion schools each and every year. It seems highly hypocritical to allow these teams the chance to compete for top honors in the country without affording competitive forensics the same opportunity. (Congratulations, by the way, to Klein High School in Texas and Hunter College Campus School in New York for capturing the 2011 titles in cheer and chess, respectively.)

I hope to correct this hypocrisy in some small way here. As the NFL gets set to honor its 2011 National Champion individuals this Saturday, I will honor the schools who ranked best in the country at the previous four NFL tournaments. I’m using the same system that the league uses to tabulate its “Schools of Excellence”; however, I will rank the top ten programs. And yes, at least in this unofficial capacity, we’ll have a clear-cut national champion school for speech and debate in each of these years.

We’ll begin by counting down the top ten speech & debate schools at the 2007 National Forensic League Championships:

10^th: South High School - Downers Grove, Illinois. Just under thirty miles to the southwest of Chicago, South High brought fourteen students to the NFL Nationals in Wichita. Half of coach Jan Heiteen’s squad competed in interpretation speech events wherein students perform works of literature; this is where the Mustangs thrived, amassing over forty-five rounds in Humorous, Dramatic, and Duo Interpretation.

9^th: San Marino High School – San Marino, California. The Tournament of Roses Parade passes by a couple of miles north of San Marino, but the talking Titans earned honors in four different events at the National Tournament. Leading the charge for coach J.J. Rodriguez was Markus Brazil, a semi-finalist in international extemporaneous speaking (which tests current events knowledge), and the Duo team of Steven Truong and Raymond Truong who finished seventh in the country.

8^th: Central High School – Springfield, Missouri. Two of the five debate divisions offered by the NFL allow students to compete in pairs – tag teams, if you will. Under the tutelage of coach Jack Tuckness, the Bulldogs qualified three such teams and all three advanced to the elimination rounds, with Nick Ramsey & Evan Dorshorst earning 4th place in the NFL’s oldest and arguably most prestigious event: Policy debate.

7^th: Snohomish High School – Snohomish, Washington. Continue up Interstate 5 from Seattle, and you’ll reach Snohomish in about an hour. Two hours more and you’ll reach Vancouver, but I hear things are a bit dicey up there, lately. No such turmoil for coach William Nicolay’s Panthers, who excelled in Public Forum debate (another two-person format with a new topic monthly) and Duo. Todd Rainey & Sarah Spiker took 4^th place in the former, and Michael Cruz & Houston Kraft reached semi-finals in the latter.

6^th: Plano Senior High School – Plano, Texas. Public Forum was also very good to coach Cheryl Potts’ Wildcats: Thao Le & Alyssa Sharp ranked second overall in the event. The school also advanced students to elimination rounds in five other events, including 10^th place orator Hoang Nguyen. This school just twenty miles north of Dallas ranked 2^nd overall at the 2005 Nationals and continues to build on its impressive record.

5^th: Leland High School – San Jose, California. Consistently one of the nation’s largest programs, Gay Brasher’s squad is an annual fixture at the awards ceremony, also. With three top-ten finishes this year (Akshay Rao, 5^th place in international extemporaneous; Crystal Adams, 8^th place in humorous interpretation; and Taman Narayan, 9^th place in the House division of Student Congress), the Chargers enjoy a second consecutive year in the top ten and third such finish since 2002, when they were national champions.

4^th: Lakeville North High School – Lakeville, Minnesota. As you’ll see, the Minneapolis area boasts several accomplished speech and debate programs. Jim Fedje’s team may not have been immediately recognized before the 2007 Nationals, but after bringing ten students to Wichita and seeing every single one of them earn an award, these Panthers are noticed. Karen Zhou’s 2^nd place expository speech and the 5^th place finish of Duo team Adam Bouchareb & Katelyn Zehr capped an impressive tournament.

3^rd : Apple Valley High School – Apple Valley, Minnesota. Imagine Tara VanDerveer marrying Phil Jackson and the couple coaching basketball together. Then you might sense the coaching prowess that Pam Cady Wycoff and her husband Joe bring to this powerhouse program fifteen minutes north of Lakeville. Seven students placed among the top six in their events in Wichita (notably Olusheun Olupitan and Carrie Van Dusen, who placed 2^nd and 4^th respectively in original oratory), enabling the Eagles to perch among the NFL’s top five schools for the third time since being crowned 2001’s National Champions.

2^nd : Bellarmine College Preparatory – San Jose, California. A top-ten staple who won the Championship in 2004, Kim Jones’ team regularly fields champions and finalists in just about every event. The Bells advanced fourteen students to elimination rounds in Wichita – eight debaters, six speakers – and earned three top-ten awards: Jonathan Padilla in the Senate division of Student Congress (6^th place) plus Evan Larson and Brian Stephan in national extemporaneous speech (10^th and 2^nd place, respectively).

2007 National Champion: James Logan High School – Union City, California. About midway between Oakland and San Jose on the east side of San Francisco Bay, you’ll find the impressive program that has been lauded by Oprah Winfrey and featured in its own documentary. More precisely, you’ll find its inspiring leader, Tommie Lindsey, who earned a third consecutive NFL title behind two speech championships (Cameron Steele in humorous interpretation plus Taron Grizzell & Karen Joshi in Duo) and two equally impressive showings in the Lincoln/Douglas (Bilal Malik, 2^nd place) and Public Forum (Ahmad Asir & Kyle Curson, 3^rd place) debate events.