Valery Liang

On Feb. 15, Rolla High School hosted its first-ever Speech & Debate tournament. From 8:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M., 133 competitors from 10 schools around South Central Missouri engaged in a whirlwind of one-on-one and partner debates, informative speaking events, dramatic poetry readings, and more activities.
The tournament—known as the Rolla Bulldog Invitational—concluded at approximately 6:00 PM, when the awards ceremony honoring successful competitors in each event ended and Rolla student volunteers began cleaning up.
Patrick Brooks, Rolla High School Speech & Debate coach and English teacher, was the primary organizer of the tournament.
“November-ish is when myself, Ms. Rowland, and Ms. Lowrey started having planning conversations. Things got more intense from about a month out; that’s when the schools that say they’re going to come tell you for sure whether they’re going to come, and when you start sending threatening emails about how people don’t have judges,” Brooks said.
To prepare for the tournament, the Rolla Speech & Debate had to find over 100 event judges and set up trophies, rooms, and meals for volunteers.
“Hosting itself on the day of the event is very stressful. The days leading up to it are stressful too, only because there’s just lots and lots of administrative tasks to be done. The first two hours of [the tournament] were very, very unpleasant, and then the rest of the day was great,” Brooks elaborated. “The only real problem was people dropping out of events at the last minute. And I’m relieved now that it’s over.”
According to Brooks, the tournament featured IEs (Individual Events), which are speech-based competitions such as Extemporaneous Speaking and Humorous Interpretation, alongside a selection of small debate events.
Debate, at its heart, is student-driven and student-focused. In addition to Brooks, senior Speech & Debate captains Audrey Smith and Lillian Webb, alongside junior captain Isaac Brooks, were in charge of judges, debate tabs, and awards, respectively.
“I was in charge of all the judges at our tournament. I was communicating with them and scheduling them, and, once we got to tournament day, I also worked with them to make sure we had the right number of judges in all our rooms so we could get started on time and finish efficiently,” Smith explained. “The tournament itself was a little crazy … a lot of work, a lot of heart rate spikes.”
Smith began debating in her sophomore year of high school, and, as a senior, this is her last year on the Speech & Debate team.
“I’ve known the Brookses for a long time, so when I was in fifth grade, [Mr. Brooks] was like, ‘When I move to Rolla, you’re gonna be on the team.’ So I’ve been kind of forced into it, but I’ve loved it. And it’s actually weird to think about, but I won’t be going to any more tournaments this year,” Smith said.
Smith will be pursuing a major in Marketing once she graduates, and hopes she can find opportunities to coach debaters in the future to keep Speech & Debate in her life.
Ultimately, though this tournament was the first that Rolla has ever hosted, it was a well-deliberated step in an overarching plan to expand local debate culture.
“I decided pretty early on that we were actually going to cater to smaller schools. Small schools tend to not have debate programs—or, at the very least, they’re very tiny, and they’re just getting off the ground,” Brooks explained. “As a five-to-ten-year plan, what we want, ultimately, is for this little stretch of the I-44, South Central Missouri community to have a much more robust and vibrant Speech & Debate world. But at the beginning of that is somebody who has to be the center—the focal point of that community.”
Brooks believes that hosting the Invitational will set a significant precedent for other schools to increase their initiative and participation.
“You have to go first. If you host, more people will come to your tournament, and then you can talk to them about hosting. And if they come to your tournament and their kids experience success, they’ll get more kids on their team. And so nothing happens without someone who has the experience being willing to host and create that focal core,” Brooks said.
Brooks also added, “I am very grateful to our sponsors. MS&T sponsored everyone’s lunch and Blue Fish sponsored our trophies. And thank you to all the judges and admins for letting us do it, because if they say no, then it doesn’t matter how good or bad I am at planning—it’s not going to happen.”