The room falls silent and all eyes turn to you—it’s your turn to give a speech to a panel of judges and a room full of strangers. While to many, this scenario exists only in a nightmare, this is how members of the Speech and Debate Club spend their Saturdays.
Speech and Debate is a club at the high school that involves practicing and competing in different forms of public speaking. The debate team meets on Tuesdays after school in preparation for debating various cases, and the speech team meets on Thursdays after school and specializes in crafting and delivering speeches. Speech and debate practice sessions are separate, with most members belonging to only one group. However, the two groups travel to most competitions together, so members have the chance to compete for either one of the two groups.
Bringing home two sweepstakes and accumulating various individual state qualifications, co-captain and senior Flo Spunt said this has been the team’s most successful year. Sweepstakes, which are calculated by considering each school’s highest 10 scorers, can be difficult to win due to the team’s small size.
“When we win a sweepstakes award, [which] we’ve never done before this year, almost everyone who went to the tournament scores [and] competed for that,” Spunt said. “Usually sweepstakes are just for big schools that have their best scores included and winning sweepstakes awards means we as a team are strong, not just individually.”
In addition to their small size, co-captain and senior Brett Schneider said that being a student-run team can disadvantage them.
“If you compare that to all of the other teams in Massachusetts that have professional coaches working full time for them, we are sort of at a disadvantage already,” Schneider said. “We really have to have the grit and the determination to put in the work to make it happen. So if anything, our debaters are more fierce as a result.”
Key in overcoming the challenge of being both small and without many resources, Schneider said, is the camaraderie within the team. In the debate team, Schneider said members frequently collaborate, an effort that was recently strengthened by a new mentorship program they have implemented.
“We’ve started this mentorship program where new competitors will get matched with a varsity debater,” Schneider said. “They can have someone to go to to help them with their cases and help them prepare.”
Spunt said she feels the strong community within the team especially as they go to different competitions.
“We went to this tournament and they had an opportunity for schools to do karaoke. I signed us up and we all sang ‘Party in the USA’ together. I thought that that was really cool because it was, you know, ‘We are Brookline.’ We were just singing and swaying to the music. I thought that was really awesome,” Spunt said.
Though she had little prior experience, sophomore Heather Kim said she felt welcomed by the community when joining. Along with the community, Kim said, Speech and Debate has strengthened her everyday life skills.
“Job interviews—I had to get one, and if I didn’t do Speech and Debate I feel like I would have been less confident and less [able to think] on my feet,” Kim said.
Spunt said that Speech and Debate has built many important skills. For debate competitions, she has to be prepared to argue both sides of a conflict, which she said has developed her critical thinking.
“I think in today’s world, social media platforms feed you on a silver platter more and more extreme versions of your opinion and the news can be very one-sided, so it’s so important to question what you see and know that there’s another side; there’s always going to be a fact that could sway your view and I think you really learn that from debate,” Spunt said. “In our polarized society right now, being able to understand that there’s another side is something that’s really special.”
