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Nathan Leys competed for Des Moines Roosevelt High School (IA). Last year, he became the 2013 NFL National Champion in International Extemporaneous Speaking. During his career, Nathan also notched victories at the Yale Invitational (2012), Glenbrooks (2012), and St. Mark’s (USX-2011). He also won the Exhibition Round at last season’s Montgomery Bell Academy Extemp Round Robin and was a three time Iowa state champion in extemporaneous speaking (USX-2011, IX-2012 & 2013). This fall he will study global affairs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he will participate in college forensics. Nathan agreed to sit down with Extemp Central for a two part interview to share his thoughts on extemporaneous speaking, reflect on his career, and provide advice to future extemporaneous speakers. The first part of the interview can be found here.
What was your favorite source to cite?
It depends on the topic. For domestic politics, Roll Call is a brilliant and underutilized source. For Asia rounds, The Diplomat, and so on. I think my favorite source use ever would have been MBA Exhibition my junior year. I pulled a question about Beijing’s use of automobile tariffs, and my background source was The China Car Times 12/31/11.
Your teammate Lily Nellans often received more attention from casual observers on the national circuit because of her success at some of the high profile tournaments like the MBA Round Robin and the Extemp TOC. What was it like having a teammate of that caliber and was it frustrating at times or do you think it made you a better competitor in the long run?
When we started this year, we wanted to do good extemp, and to be the best presenters we could be. If you do extemp (or any event) for the competition, you lose automatically. It’s about making you a better performer and a better person. In one sense, I would have been as happy with my NFLs results if I had gone straight 7’s as I was about winning. Because ranks aren’t the point. Lily and I both had that attitude, so there wasn’t any rivalry between us.
Walk us through your NFL tournament experience. You entered the final round in first place and didn’t relinquish the lead in the final round. How did you approach the tournament and keep your mental focus through the 13 rounds of competition?
NFLs is definitely a marathon, not a sprint. It helped that my team traveled so much this year. Doing 31 speeches at Sunvite or 25+ at Patriot Games, or going to 10 consecutive travel tournaments, gave me the mental stamina to just buckle down and keep going. Additionally, in the month and a half before NFLs, I incorporated running into my practice routine, which really helped my endurance. I also went to bed as early as humanly possible during the tournament. I was asleep by 7:30pm after the first day of competition, which gave me the energy to win the next morning’s rounds. As for my approach to the tournament, I took it one speech at a time. I took the mindset that each speech was just another round, up to and including finals. With that mindset, my training took over, and I just did extemp.
You are known on the circuit as an extemper that does a great job blending intelligent humor with good analysis. Is there a way that you coached yourself to do this or is it just a natural extension of your personality?
A little of both. The best piece of extemp advice I ever got was from Tim Sheaff of Dowling Catholic, which is Des Moines’s Catholic school. He told me to try to be Jon Stewart, because Stewart does a brilliant job of taking complex topics and making them engaging, crystal-clear, and relatable. To develop that style, I had to work on everything from timing (I spent a whole 2 days on that during extension at camp one year, it’s really hard) to research (the entire world is a joke if you can read between the lines of people taking themselves too seriously). I’m a pretty sardonic person in real life, but I did have to work to adapt that to extemp. If there are novices reading this, I’d advise them to go watch recordings of Millburn’s Chase Harrison. In my opinion, he does the best job of anyone on the circuit of contextualizing and pointing out just how ridiculous current events really are.
If a novice extemper asked you for three, quick pieces of advice on how to get to your level in the activity, what advice would you give them?
Three pieces – I see what you did there. 1) Practice. Obviously this seems pretty standard, but too often extempers assume that they’re too smart to just speak. That’s crap. With Lily and me, the person who practiced the most in the week before a tournament almost always beat the other. When we practiced the same amount, like for MBA this year, we were pretty much in a tie – I was one rank from winning the overall tournament and she was just a few ranks from beating me in Exhibition. 2) Read. Everything. Not just they NYT, WaPo, Brookings, and WSJ. Find blogs that you might not cite in a round, but that provide the kind of analysis that gets picked up by major sources 6-12 months later. Find evidence for the arguments they make. Research topics that interest you. Memorize specific programs, laws, politicians, whatever. The best analysis comes when extempers name specifics in their B subpoint, because the best solvency comes when you know how to actually solve things. “Soft Power” is not good extemp. Naming a State Department program to provide firewall-circumventing software to Tibetans is. 3) Listen to your coaches. One of my biggest problems in extemp is that for a few years, I didn’t really think my coaches always knew what they were doing. Strong would sometimes take phone calls during the second point of a practice speech, and then yell at me for not making an argument that he missed. But Strong’s brilliance as a coach is that his off-the-wall style prepares you for real events. For example, in an Oratory prelim at state this year, another competitor tried to throw me off my game by making disgusting faces for 10 minutes – which is just a Tuesday at Roosevelt’s practice.
What are your academic/career plans now that your high school extemporaneous speaking career is behind you? Do you plan to judge/coach any in the near future?
I’ll be continuing my extemp career in college as a member of the George Mason University forensics team. Right now, I’m declared as a Global Affairs major with a concentration in Asian studies, and I’ll also be studying Spanish, Mandarin, and probably adding an International Security minor. I’ll be helping out with Champion Files, the new extemp program by the same people behind the PFD Champion Briefs service, and I’ll almost certainly be coaching. I hope I’ll be able to go to some of the larger circuit tournaments like Yale or Harvard to judge, but we’ll see! That’s a ways off.
Closing thoughts?
Trust yourself. If you work, you can’t get worse.