As the Speech & Debate team prepares for the upcoming season, they face new and old challenges.
“Our current issues with the debate team are financial issues and member retention,” president of the Speech & Debate team Jocelyn Conney said.
Every year, the team loses some of its membership.
“Last year we had a lot of our leadership graduate, which definitely leaves a big hole to fill here,” Coach of the Speech & Debate team Mr. Beane said. “Part of our leadership was very charismatic, Spencer Benton of course, who I will note got a full ride to Baylor because of debate. He was an excellent advocate for the team, along with all of our other seniors.”
To address these gaps, the team is developing new ways to maintain member retention.
“We’re trying to make the meetings more interesting and novices more willing to participate in the events while overall not just catering to debate, but speech and debate,” Conney said.
This also comes with the team’s current members helping each other.
“If we have members who need to go to prep sessions, we need to have at least one captain at the meetings; stay active and not lose our passion for the club as the year goes on,” Conney said.
The team is also planning to increase and continue its history of community outreach through service projects and events.
“The student body will do a lot of outreach efforts along with the meetings,” Mr. Beane said. “You will also hear about us over the announcements for our service projects that we will do. We host a massive tournament that will try to fill those holes. Our team administration is working really hard to make that happen. There are no easy solutions, but we’re working on it.”
On the financial end, the team has had to make some changes to balance this year’s new constraints.
“We definitely had to take a long look at our tournament schedule,” Mr. Beane said. “We had to remove tournaments. We compete all the time, so we have close to 20 tournaments and competitions we attend.”
In the face of this, the team is looking for ways to raise money.
“We are trying to fundraise and collaborate with different methods, so we can raise money and have the class cheaper,” Conney said. “Starting a booster club, or starting a fundraiser at Ace, or collaborating with Chick-Fil-A.”
But, budget cuts don’t just affect Langham Creek. Restricted funding across the district has caused Cy-Fair schools to convene on ways to collectively ease each other’s financial burdens.
“The price for transportation dramatically increased across the board for the district, so finding out ways to carpool and share transportation with other schools,” Mr. Beane said. “All of those are us working together in the district because every debate team in the district is in the same boat in terms of funding, so the more we can do to help out each other the better off we will all be.”
Despite these challenges, the team is expecting to have a good season this year.
“I have high expectations for the team,” Mr. Beane said. “This year we’re going to, in multiple events, speech and debate, qualify for the state championship in March. I have no doubt we’ll be the district champions in policy debate for UIL, and I anticipate that you will hear about Langham Creek debate making the deep elimination rounds at national tournaments.”
With confidence and anticipation, the team will be entering into their first tournament of the season this upcoming Friday held at Jersey Village.
