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Looking for a place to sharpen your voice, boost your confidence and take center stage? The National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA) club gives students the chance to compete, perform and grow as communicators.
The NSDA gives students a platform to express themselves, develop their communication skills and receive constructive feedback in various performance categories.
Club members and advisor Mr. Angelino Simbulan meet every Thursday and Friday at lunch, in Room 113 to prepare for their competitive categories, including speech, debate, declamation, duo interpretation, impromptu, original oratory, original post poetry and spar.
To help members focus their practice, the club is broken into two groups: speech students and debate students. Separating into two groups allows students to focus on their specific events since the rules and competition formats for speech and debate differ significantly.
Speech students are often nicknamed “the theatre kids” because many of their events involve performing condensed versions of movies, plays or TV shows in 10 minutes or less.
The debate group, currently made up of 16 students, practices by engaging in spontaneous argumentation — quick debates that simulate real competition conditions.
Club president Steven Tu, a junior, helps prepare students for upcoming competitions.
“For future competitions, we all get nervous just thinking about them, but we push through it and even if we don’t win we can learn from our mistakes and be there for each other,” he said.
Despite their different roles, all members share one goal: to compete successfully and qualify for state-level tournaments.
”We want to win so we can get to state qualifiers and then eventually go to state. It is a lot of work, but we enjoy the journey of it,” Mr. Simbulan said.
And win they have, with award after award the club gets closer to their objective. Since their first competition, they have been rewarded with many awards such as the 2024 Gab Gab Gab Speech Invitationals, where they won first place with two trophies. Next they competed in their first TCFL (Tri-County Forensics League) Winter Open Speech tournament where they came out with three finalist medals in the TCFL Spring Open Speech tournament, they won four gold finalist medals.
These medals let the students who qualified to compete in the state qualifiers finally get to the TCFL Speech State Qualifier, where they had to compete against one another and had, yet again, won a finalist medal as well as two state qualifier plaques.
While the club is competitive, members say the experience helps them grow and bond with one another.
“For our past competitions it’s a lot of work and takes a long time to be completely prepared, but students have appointments with me where I can help them and give them feedback so they can be more ready for competitions,” Mr. Simbulan said.
Mr. Simbulan has been hoping the club will eventually evolve into an advanced speech class focused on competition and different performance styles. “A class where it’s easier to learn during the day instead of only during lunch time or after school would be a good opportunity for the program to grow,” Mr. Simbulan said. “We would like to have the same class opportunity that other schools get to have.”
Mr. Simbulan has announced recently the NSDA Speech and Debate is now a class, and would love for students to join.
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2025 print edition.