Nathan King

The Talking Rams’ collection of trophies – representing decades of accomplishments – sits overlooking the multipurpose room. Under the guidance of Waterson and by supporting each other, team members have continued to succeed during this school year. “I’m trying to make sure the team gets what they need and has the resources they need,” Waterson said. “But, students have been coaching each other and helping each other more than I have.

The Talking Rams speech and debate team competed in a variety of events at multiple district tournaments in March. The first tournament was run by MSHSAA March 6, where members were able to qualify for the state tournament later this school year.

“It was quite stressful,” Felix Zhang (11) said. “Overall, I would say there’s a lot of people that were prepping outside of the round and a lot of [good speakers].” 

The students advancing to state  will be Zhang, Zoran Pan (10), Charlie Fan (9), Ananya Goli (10), Jessie Wang (10), Daniel Wang (11), Ashvik Chilakala (11), Henry Madden (10), Jackson Lloyd (10), JoeJoe Shil (9), Roger Tang (9), Addie Flintrop (11), Liam Shoghi (11), Zoe Mei (10), Soumya Prasad (10), Sasha Prasad (10), Elle Saleeby (10), Emery Mao (10) and Eric Thiele (9). Zhang competed in U.S. Extemporaneous Speaking, and he qualified by going to the final round.

“I draw a question, and I have 30 minutes to read about the question, prepare some points and then after that I just have to memorize it,” Zhang said. “They were behind, so I think I had approximately 50 instead of 30 minutes of prep time. One of my friends was going to watch me speak, but we ended up just chatting outside before I was going to speak, because there were still two people ahead of me.”

However, the district tournament for MSHSAA was only the first hurdle for the team in the postseason. The team competed at the National Speech & Debate Association’s districts for the chance to qualify for nationals March 12-14. Due to these high stakes, team members prepared extensively, which paid off with five members qualifying to the national tournament.

“First, we were really digesting this topic, because there’s a lot of jargon and terms we needed to know, from contract for deeds, buy to rent, LLCs, all that,” team vice president Rex Zhu said. “Once we [got] through that, we brainstorm[ed] arguments and responses to them to make sure we were prepared for the debate. And then, we did a practice round to flesh some things out and see what a real round [looks like].”