“Exodus to Excellence” is a four-year series that will focus on my high school journey through extemporaneous speaking. Assisted by old ballots and a journal kept during these years, these columns will provide reflections on lots of old competitions and the lessons learned along the way. Each week that a tournament took place in my career, one of these columns will appear.
Background
After my first tournament experience at Scott County, I could not wait to get on the bus and do it again. Even though I did not clear to finals that tournament showed me that I had potential in the activity in the long run so I was immediately invested from that point forward. Unfortunately, I would have to wait close to a month before the team’s next competition. Danville always hosted its annual Tournament of Firsts the weekend before Thanksgiving. It was typically one of the best attended competitions in the state, creating logistical problems for my coach, Steve Meadows, because our school was only built to house a student body of 600. As a freshman my task at the tournament was to serve as a timer for extemporaneous speaking rounds. So three times that day I reported to a room and did time signals. For some this would be a mind-numbing task but I used it to scout who I was likely to face later in the year. While I do not remember who won the tournament, I recall making mental notes of what good speakers did and why judges preferred certain competitors over others. I was still too young to understand what made great analysis in a speech but I learned quickly that judges hated speakers that spoke too fast, could not remain in one place during a point, and went short on time. I also remember one poor guy giving a 12-second speech on whether the death penalty should be abolished. He came in, read his question, answered it, and left the room.
As I noted in my write up of the Scott County Invitational, I wanted to continue to improve at extemporaneous speaking. The problem was that I did not know what I needed to do to accomplish that. I continued to do my usual routine of giving one or two speeches each week in practice before the next competition but I had not grasped the concept of needing to speak beyond the 6:00 mark. I also did not entertain the idea of abandoning a notecard in speeches despite getting a comment in my first round of competition that I should do that. The other idea of actually reading magazines and newspapers instead of simply tearing them apart is also something that I did not consider. Instead, I thought the key was to avoid stumbling at all costs in competition and sounding as “pretty” as possible.
The team’s next competition would take place at Harrison County High School in Cynthiana, Kentucky the week after we returned from Thanksgiving break. And this was no ordinary tournament, it was a swing. A swing tournament, for those who are familiar, is two tournaments in one day. Competitors do two prelims of the first tournament, two prelims of the second tournament, and then finals for each tournament happened in succession. So students get up to six rounds of competition and there are two award ceremonies at the end. The benefit of this model is that competitors got lots of rounds and had multiple opportunities to pre-qualify for the state tournament. Pre-qualifying required one to make the final round of their event as long as 12 schools were in attendance. A swing tournament makes for an exhausting day, especially if someone is doing multiple events, but that was not something that I had to worry about at this stage of my forensic career.
On this day, Harrison County would be “swinging” with Lloyd Memorial High School. Lloyd’s tournament would happen first in the schedule. Lloyd’s best competitor, Ryan Martin, graduated the previous year and was the Kentucky High School Speech League (KHSSL) State Champion in extemporaneous speaking. He went on to a final round finish at the National Catholic Forensic League (NCFL) National Tournament and was a quarter-finalist in United States Extemp at the National Forensic League (NFL) National Tournament. For the rest of my high school career the school would never find someone to replicate his success.
Aside from the usual anxiety of starting a new tournament, I felt settled getting on the bus for the hour trip to Cynthiana. I knew how the “flow” of a tournament worked and what I could expect in a prep room. And I went in with the idea that if I could execute two good speeches in a row that I had a good chance of making my first final round.
Note: For round summaries, I will attempt to “rebuild” rounds as much as possible. I will provide the question, my speech time (at least for early speeches), and an outline of what I said. Unfortunately, if a judge did not write down my three points or answer, I have no idea how I answered some of these topics, especially since I was a chameleon in extemp that would be conservative in one round and liberal the next. I will also provide my ranking.
Round 1 – Lloyd Memorial Half
Question: Should marijuana be legalized?
Speech Time: 6:22
Ranking: 2
Reflection: Ah, the never-ending question that extempers had to answer until the big wave of marijuana legalization started happening on the state level in late 2012. What makes this round funnier is that the judges’ first name was “Mary Jane.” I guess God has a sense of humor! The judge commented that this was a “worn out” topic so they must have seen many speeches on it before.
One good thing about this round is that my time was better than Scott County. This was the first speech in competition that I gave that went over six minutes. That was a step in the right direction in terms of getting to a competitive time versus other speakers.
I was shooting for a one in this round and fell short. The judge thought that I had good reasons for my argumentation – reasons that did not appear on the ballot – but they ranked me down for gesturing too much, a problem that I would have through a good portion of my career.
At a swing tournament it was very important to get first place ranks. Scores of 1-1, 1-2, and 1-3 would get you into finals but scores of 2-2 would always fall short because of reciprocals. I did not know that at the time but this meant that the next round would have to be better if I wanted to break at my second tournament.
Round 2- Lloyd Memorial Half
Question: Are drug terrorist overtaking Colombia?
Answer: Yes
Points:
1-Effects on U.S. policy
2-Colombia is facing a fierce enemy
3-Colombia is not winning the drug war
Speech Time: 6:10
Ranking: 3
Reflection: So this is an interesting round for several reasons. First, this was the first time that I had to speak about an explicitly non-domestic topic at a tournament. And I was completely stumped. Keep in mind from the previous column that I had no discovered the importance of reading before competing at tournaments so all of my news was coming from cable programming, C-SPAN, and AM radio. None of those gave me any context for handling a question about Colombia’s long drug war. So when I chose this topic – and I forget what else I drew – I was panicked. Luckily, our team had a nice “Colombia” file with a few articles, notably a piece from Newsweek that gave a one-page summary of the war. Still, when you do not know much about a topic there is not a lot you can learn in 30 minutes and put together a coherent speech. So a big lesson that should have been learned here is that I needed to read more and even take files home with me for a weekend to learn about different topics. Did I do that, though? No. So if you are an extemper out there today who hopes that the Internet will give you everything you need to know and use that an excuse to avoid reading, take it from me when I say that is a bad idea.
Another reason this speech was significant is that I was judged by Ryan Martin, noted earlier in this column as the reigning Kentucky state champion and NCFL finalist. Like many past competitors, his ballot was more helpful than most that I would receive that season. He commented on how my point preview was not clear, that I was too reliant on my notecard, that I overstated some claims on the topic (which included a statement about how the U.S. was going to go to Colombia to fight drug terrorists like we had once gone to Vietnam to fight communists) and that I had too many stumbles. However, he did praise the fact that I had a multitude of sources and that I demonstrated good confidence on an international topic. In a comment that resonated with me long afterward, he noted that I “had a lot of potential,” which gave me some confidence after I read this ballot after the tournament. One piece of advice that I do wish I listened to more for the next four years was to relax while speaking. I always felt tense when delivering speeches and looking back, I wish I had enjoyed the experience a lot more.
Unfortunately, being out of my depth on this topic did me a good deal of harm to my composite score. Experienced extempers that look at how I attacked this speech will notice that my points do not all feed into my answer either. For example, my first point is not clearly about Colombia. I am sure that I might have been meaning to talk about how U.S. policy was not working to help Colombia but that was not coherent.
After this round, I began competing in the Harrison County prelims. After those were done, the posting of finals for the Lloyd Memorial half were up. I knew that my speech on Colombia probably doomed me and I was right.
But the nice thing about swing tournaments is that you get another crack at things so here is how Harrison County’s half of the tournament went:
Round 1 – Harrison County Half
Question: What can America’s military learn from the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole?
Speech Time: 5:44
Ranking: 1
Reflection: This round marked the first time that I achieved a first place rank in an extemp round. Thankfully, there would be many more to come! For readers unfamiliar with this issue, the U.S.S. Cole was an American naval vessel that was attacked off the coast of Yemen by al-Qaeda several weeks prior to this tournament. It killed 17 naval personnel and, in retrospect, is seen as one of the early warning shots that Osama bin Laden was gearing up for a bigger attack on the United States. Thanks to my friend Joel Meister, who was a resident team expert on bin Laden, I knew a good amount about this attack and was able to channel that into the speech.
My judge for this round was Greg Adams, the head coach of Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School in Lexington. He judged me many times in my career and will appear in these columns several times. While he would not typically go after the analytics of an extemp speech, he was a good critic for evaluating delivery. That was worth its weight in gold later in my career when I needed to refine that more to do well for judges at nationals. In this round, he noted that I needed to show more emotion and that I needed to sell my answer to the topic more. He did comment that I did a poor job actually answering the question because I did not address the “learn” component of it as much, choosing to speak more about what happened with the attack and the effects of it. He was also the first judge to comment that I needed to consider broadcast announcing as a future event because I had a good voice for it.
It was good to get a first place rank but I was only going against three competitors in this round, which must have been because some people dropped the day of the tournament. My time was also not great as I clocked my shortest speech of the day. However, what got me through this round was having good organization, something that Mr. Adams complimented in the speech. Therefore, a good lesson for extempers to develop good structure first. If an audience cannot follow a speech, there are going to be problems. Develop organization first, then work on delivery, and then keep working on your content knowledge to improve analysis.
Round 2 – Harrison County Half
Question: What will be the fate of the Electoral College?
Answer: It will stay
Points:
1-States all get some degree of representation in status quo
2-Smaller states will not favor abandoning it
3-Candidates will focus on bigger states in alternative models
Speech Time: 6:30
Ranking: 1
Reflection: Extempers who lived during the early 2000s know that after the close George W. Bush-Al Gore contest we were inundated with questions like this due to the fact that Bush became the first person since 1888 to win a presidential election without winning the popular vote. At the time of this speech the courts were still adjudicating the way that votes were handled in Florida as the Supreme Court would not step in for more than another week. Giving speeches in the midst of a disputed presidential election is something that I have never forgotten.
Like round one of this half of the tournament, I was praised for having a good system of organization and a good spread of sources. For some reason I referenced an almanac in this speech, probably in reference to state voting numbers or something. That was probably the only time that I ever used an almanac as a source in an extemp speech.
No other comments were made in this round but looking back, my speech probably had a lot of analytical bleed as the first and second points are similar. However, the judge missed that. My time was great for this round, the longest in competition so far. That was probably due to having a decent knowledge base about a topic that sucking up all of the media’s oxygen.
As Lloyd Memorial finals were going on, I remember not attending any as I eagerly waited for postings for the Harrison half. Unlike the first two rounds of the day, I knew that I had given stronger speeches and they were about topics I was familiar with. My coach told me that I had come up just short of finals in the Lloyd half, which frustrated me. Stupid Colombia and its drug war….
Finals for Harrison went up about 30 minutes after that conversation. Due to my 1-1 performance in prelims, my name was on my first finals poster and I eagerly headed into a final round knowing that I would be bringing home a trophy.
Finals – Harrison County Half
Question: What will President Clinton’s legacy be when it comes to the Middle East?
Answer: Not good
Points:
1-How he has tackled the problem
2-How he has worked with world leaders
3-The present situation
Time: 5:54
Ranks: 2-4-4
Reflection: While nervous for my first finals appearance, I was stoked when I drew this question. Growing up in a Republican household with a grandmother that believed Bill Clinton was the Antichrist, I was treated to a fair share of rants about his failings as president. And when talks at Camp David failed between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Clinton became big figure to blame. I had a very elementary knowledge of the complicated Middle East peace process going into this tournament. And I figured that I did not need a lot of it anyway as my plan was to lay into Clinton.
What I recall about giving this speech is that I was nervous outside of the room but once I went in I felt relatively calm. It was a massive science lab with the long, black tables one associates with those types of classrooms. The judges all sat in the back, leaving tons of space between them and the front of the room where I had to speak. It was also dark outside as the judges had windows at their back, making it seem like I was speaking at 9:00 p.m. even though it was probably closer to 5:30 due to the effects of daylight savings time. I did not have a lot of stumbles in the speech, which I was proud of, and I thought I had good energy. Leaving the room, I thought I had given a competitive speech even though my time was short of six minutes.
One judge really liked the speech, giving me second place. They liked that I had six sources and a good system of organization (a common theme on this day). However, the other two judges were much more critical. One of those was Ryan Martin, who judged me for the second time that day. He was allowed to do so because a swing tournament technically counts as a new tournament so judges are wiped clean from one competition to the next, just like they would be for tournaments that happen a week apart. He jumped on some of my weak content, where I reportedly said that only 60 people had been killed in violence between the Israelis and Palestinians even though the number was much higher. Martin also reiterated that I had potential – in big capital letters this time on the ballot – but noted that I needed to be careful with evidence as I was disproving my answer rather than proving it. The third judge on the panel echoed his criticisms, saying that I left a lot of unanswered questions, especially why the material I talked about meant that Clinton’s legacy would be bad. He probably took issue with my Clinton bashing too, telling me that I had to show what Clinton did wrong and not simply blame him for the violence.
Looking over the structure of my speech, I can easily see where these criticisms came from. My points were not argumentative in nature, they were informative. At this time in my extemp career I had a bad habit of using broad categories for points. The problem with that is you end up describing evidence but never form an argument that links back to the question. For extempers reading this column, make sure that your points are always worded as arguments. I should have learned that lesson from this tournament but as a novice I did not really understand what they were trying to tell me.
The last judge was also not a fan of me using a notecard, declaring “Notes should not be used in extemp.” By this point I considered getting rid of the notecard, as I had gotten a comment at Scott County about abandoning it. However, I started to feel wedded to it as well and worried what it would be like to do a speech without it. So I decided that I would wait a while longer until I make that leap into the unknown.
At awards, I was not sure what to expect in terms of overall placing. I hoped for the best and figured that as long as I did not take sixth place then I would be happy. My composite score of 10 was good enough for fourth place. I would have liked to have placed higher but for my first finals appearance, I was happy and considered that something to build on.
Post-Tournament Thoughts
Even though I went one-for-two on the day in terms of making finals, I was proud of myself for reaching finals by my third tournament. I gave five speeches during the day and I thought all of them demonstrated good structure, even if some of the speeches like the Colombia one could have gone better if I knew something about the topic. Over time, Harrison County would become one of my favorite tournaments to attend and my team would go there each year of my high school career. Lloyd Memorial would never host another tournament while I was in high school.
When I got back to the high school I put my trophy in my backpack and exited. I did not share with my dad, who picked me up, how the tournament went, other than to say that it was a good time. He probably thought I did terrible. I wanted to reveal my performance as a surprise when I got back to our house but my mom was out with my brother at an academic team competition. When they returned, I pulled out my trophy and my parents were thrilled that I placed in the top six. That felt good.
I put the trophy on a pie safe that my mother kept in our living room. Over time, I would make it a yearly tradition to put my trophies around it for a season and then, when the season was over, box them up, just to rebuild the collection again with another set the following year. For now, though, I had only earned one trophy and the question was whether I would return to finals the following week when my school attended its last tournament of the semester at the Western Kentucky University Hilltopper Classic.