By Logan Scisco
In less than two weeks the 2009 CFL national tournament will commence in Albany, New York. It will offer the first nationwide test of extempers across the country, occurring three weeks before the NFL national tournament in Birmingham, Alabama. As a well versed extemper knows, preparation is everything before a competition and to assist in this process CFL, like its NFL counterpart, releases the extemp topic areas prior to the competition. These eight topic areas have been listed on the organization’s website, www.ncfl.org.
For an extemper who has not been to the CFL national tournament, there are eight rounds of competition. Extempers compete in for preset preliminary rounds followed by four elimination rounds. A typical preliminary field starts with nearly 200 competitors and each preliminary rounds is adjudicated by three judges. The average size of a preliminary round is seven competitors. It must also be said that there is no precise order for the topic areas. All topic areas are drawn at random prior to each round of competition, so there is no point in guessing what topic areas you will hit in each round, although there are probably some topic areas that you would rather see in preliminary rounds and avoid in elimination rounds.
The CFL extemp tournament is unique in that it centers more on domestic issues than international ones. While there have been exceptions in the past, the topic areas of the tournament have often placed domestic concerns over those in the international arena and this year’s topic areas signify a continuation of that process. At first glance, five of the topic areas are named for domestic concerns or departments in the federal government and three of the topic areas represent a broad collection of global regions.
While these topic areas are broad, I will reiterate a point made by Colin West and myself last summer when we did the NFL topic area analysis for International and United States extemp (and which will appear in the next edition of The Ex Files). This is that although these topic areas are broad (sometimes extraordinarily so), they do provide a framework that the rounds of competition will take place in, and the judges you will see in each of these rounds will be listening to a maximum of seven speeches about the same topic area. Therefore, preparing for possible questions, and using those in your practice routine before the tournament, may make the difference between going far in the tournament or having to sit and watch the remainder of the tournament on the sidelines.
As with last year, this topic area analysis will break down each of the eight topic areas released for the 2009 CFL national tournament, providing some issues that extempers should look into and some sample questions extempers can use to practice.