An Ode to the Death of Rural Debate

Okay, I know you read the title of this article, "An Ode to the Death of Rural Debate." The situation isn’t as dire as I made it out to be; speech and debate in rural states isn’t literally dying, but it may as well be dead, considering the downward spiral that it's been on.

When I read A Plan To Save Rural Debate by Akshat Anand, it really hit home for me. In a state where only ten teams showed up to our state tournament, two of which had only one entry from their school (including mine), the realization that speech and debate is "dying" in my community made me want to cry. This community, where I feel safe and welcomed by kids like me, is becoming harder and harder to become involved in simply due to our geography.

It’s not necessarily a matter of resource accessibility or support. Speaking from someone in forensics in West Virginia, the main problem in rural debate programs, as Anand said, is centralization, or the lack thereof. Seeing as there are only a handful of teams in WV, most of them are spread out across our state. A vast majority of our teams here live hours away, and are new, meaning most members lack experience. And as Anand noted: "Without a central point, advocacy projects become less effective due to poor coordination." Due to the fact that everyone in our state lives so far away, it’s difficult to compete, and exponentially more challenging to become actually involved in speech and debate.

The lack of centralization creates two new problems of its own: lack of interest and in-state opportunities (i.e. tournaments, districts, and bids). As I mentioned earlier, most teams in our state are very new. They don’t have seasoned coaching and a strong support system. It’s not even a matter of resource accessibility; plenty of our teams are involved with the NSDA and can afford briefs, lessons, and articles. But when you join a team and no one can really teach you what to do in an event or how you can succeed, it’s oftentimes discouraging.

As someone who went through this, I almost quit speech and debate at the end of my freshman year. I had placed at one tournament and I was going to be the only member on my team the following season. No one could teach me anything, so I was pretty much going into rounds with new events blindly, my only solid foundation for coaching being the NSDA and watching final rounds from national circuit tournaments. But I stayed, and I'm glad that I did.

Sadly, the majority of kids involved in the WV Speech and Debate Association quit because they went through what I did. That, and the prospects of having to go through a similar experience are daunting. This leads to teams being smaller, and usually, dying because there is no genuine interest. Another problem that branches off of this lack of interest is not having a strong foundation for tournaments. What I mean is that since many teams don’t show up to tournaments (realistically, there aren’t many in rural debate programs to begin with), we can only host so many. 

Rural debate programs additionally lack opportunities. From what I have counted, we had seven tournaments this season that were in state. One of these tournaments is WVSDA State Speech and Debate, which is WV’s equivalent of a national qualifying tournament, if you can even call it that. It technically is a national qualifying tournament, since you could qualify for the NCFL Grand National Tournament. There’s several issues with this. Firstly, the NCFL only offers six speech events and four speech and debate events. So, if you want to go to nationals for informative speaking (like me), and you live in WV, you’re out of luck. Ok, well surely it can’t be that bad. POI? Nope. Humorous Interpretation? Nada.

Because of the lack of events compared to the NSDA, the NCFL is significantly smaller. From online records that are available on their tabroom page, there are only around twenty states that attend the NCFL, compared to the nearly double amount of states that attend the National Speech and Debate Tournament, not counting territories. This begs the question; if the NCFL is less-competitive and disables numerous competitors from competing in WV, why don’t we switch to NSDA? The simple answer is that we can’t.

Per the national qualification standards that the NSDA abides by, there are a few ways to host a district tournament: “Any district that attained at least twelve charter chapters with paid membership, twenty chapters of any type with paid membership, 200 new members, or over 700 new degrees in the prior school year is allowed to hold a district qualifying tournament series.”

Well, according to the NSDA, WV only had three active charters last year (meaning we don’t even have 12). Worse, only 67 new members joined our circuit this year. Forget having 700 new degrees; WV had 159, less than a fourth of that. Across eleven active high school debate programs in WV, we don’t have the engagement to even consider hosting a district tournament. Multitudes of rural debate programs across our state face this very same issue. 

For what it's worth, I’m still worried about my school’s speech and debate program. Seeing as now, only a handful of kids my age and I are involved, it’s likely that, when we inevitably leave high school, so will our speech and debate program. So, where can the little guy turn? As far as I have researched, there are three options.

One: We can host a district tournament if, and only if, we have a pre-approved growth plan. Ok, easy enough. But according to the NSDA, a district can only create a pre-approved growth plan if there was realignment or a district split, meaning many rural debate programs in districts without access to an NSDA qualifier are disqualified from this choice. 

Two: Attend the NSDA Last-Chance Qualifier, which is online. 

Finally, option three: Go to district’s in another state. Although some teams in my circuit are planning on going to district’s in Kentucky, the process to be able to do this is not clear. From what the NSDA has made available, you have to "petition to attend a qualifying tournament in a contiguous district." How can we do that? Is the timeline for being able to achieve this reasonable? The NSDA isn’t clear at all.

So, what can rural debate programs do to fix these issues? While Chapters of Equality in Forensics are an amazing leap forward that has definitely helped WV become more connected, we need more. If we care about speech and debate, a physical initiative to reach-out to people is needed. The best solution for rural debate programs is to start reaching out to anyone and everyone; coaches, teachers, even students. Going back to A Plan To Save Rural Debate, we can save rural speech and debate via centralization, resource infrastructure, and training, but I think there’s two more items that need to be talked about: support and advocacy. 

Support in a rural state that is as big as WV is not easily achievable. There’s no blueprint for how rural debate programs can build a strong community and keep students coming back. A few methods I have seen work successfully firsthand, on a state-level, include outreach and marketing. Besides talking to members of other speech and debate programs, by getting these students involved with Equality in Forensics, they become a part of a large community for speech and debate.

Marketing has also been a hit for rural debate communities. A lot of teams in the U.S. are turning to social media, primarily Instagram. By getting your team active on social media, you have another outlet to recruit new members. WV even has a student-ran Instagram page for the high school speech and debate community.

Touching on advocacy, it’s a sensitive topic. It’s scary, putting yourself out there. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no guide for advocacy in rural debate programs. As rural debaters, we're just expected to fend for ourselves. But if we do not want to talk about the death of rural speech and debate programs, who will?