Student Life

What Is Speech?

May 26, 2017

(Please note that this contains a large amount of cynical humor. This is not written to tear down speech or anyone involved in the production of speech. Make sure you read this with a grain of salt or sugar: whatever suits your fancy.)

The 2016/17 year has brought great success to the New Ulm speech team. This success has resulted in a multitude of ribbons, trophies, and pride for the many students involved in the activity. As the faces of the speech team members appear more in the paper, a curiosity has arose. Speech seems to be a mystery to anyone who is not involved. Even students that have watched speech meets tend to be slightly confused by the hundreds of competitors in suits, talking to lockers. Speech tends to be pretty simple.

Each day starts out with about 20 grumpy, well dressed, and coffee clutching teens loading a bus at about 6:50, or whatever ungodly hour of the morning that students dread on a Saturday. After an hour of being awoken from their naps due to the bumps in the road and noise of the other students, the speech team arrives at the highschool that will be their prison for the next eight hours. Upon arrival the students begin to roam the school trying to find out what classroom, or in the case of storytellers, what broom closets, they will be performing in. Luckily, the bus arrived on time so that the competitors have time to practice their speech once or twice. This raises the next question that viewers of a speech would have: is everyone crazy?

The answer is no, not EVERYONE, just the majority. Speech team members are a rare breed who feel 100% comfortable talking to lockers. This actually makes a lot of sense, considering everyone else is too busy giving their speeches to lockers to listen to you give yours. At a speech meet it is completely normal to talk to walls or lockers, if you aren’t doing it you’re going to be considered the weird one. After running through your speech a few times you enter your room with your competition and begin the first of three rounds. Draw categories are a little different. For draw categories, competitors draw three topics or stories one at a time every seven minutes until everyone has a story. Once the story is drawn the student has 30 minutes to practice and prepare their speech. It is not rare to walk down the Storytelling hallway as see people dancing and talking to strangers after they practiced their speech twice.

In each round the competitors are compared to the others in the room and are given a score between 80-100: 100 being a perfect score. The judge in the room, ranging from a professional to a speech mom who was asked to judge, will then rank the students 1-5. If there are more than five students in a room then fifth place and down will all receive a 5. After the three rounds are up scores are totaled and the top 5-8 competitors from each category moves on to finals. At some meets there are novice finals: these are purely for speech students in their first year. If a novice is truly amazing they are able to final in varsity, but a varsity member may never final as a novice. At finals the entire process starts over again the only difference is being that in the varsity final rooms there are three judges. The judges once again rate the competitors and the scores are averaged.

The next event to happen at the speech meet stands as a favorite of the majority of speechies: lunch time. It is only at speech where you will find students willing to talk for 6 hours straight to be able to buy an overpriced piece of pizza. Lunch is a sacred time at a speech meet. It is when the tension and excitement for trophies that buzzed through the air dies down as the competitors sit down with their warm pizza and sugary drinks.

After lunch it is finally time for awards. All of the speech competitors pile into the gym or auditorium, awaiting for scores to come in. An adult that enters the room gets a round of applause as impatient students assume they have the scores. When the person that ACTUALLY has the scores enters the room everyone erupts into thunderous cheers. Everyone waits in anticipated silence even though they all know the drill by now. Students in every category of speech sit in anticipation for their category to be called. Even students that didn’t final are still excited because they have a chance to win a ribbon for being one or two points away from finaling. Awards tend to take, or at least feel like they take, the longest time. There are a total of thirteen categories that each go one at a time and in alphabetical order. This process can also double in time if there are novice finals. Novice is always called up first and is given their trophies, medals, or ribbons. When a winner is announce they recieve a “speech” clap, a.k.a. a singular clap because everyone knows speechies don’t have time to sit around and clap all day. First place in each category gets a standing ovation because speechies love standing up and sitting down repeatedly twenty-six (and a few more) times in a row! After each category has been properly praised, teams are awarded. Each placement gives a school a certain amount of points that are then added up to figure out which school has done the best. It is always surprising to see which team has placed first, again. After awards students are finally free to load their buses and kick off their heels and dress shoes that they stole from their fathers’ closet.

That is the basics of what a speech meet is like, but the categories are still unknown to everyone else someone has superpowers and is able to watch all thirteen categories in four rounds.