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Despite being a new club formed just this year, Robinson Voices proves themselves to be notable by qualifying five members and one alternate. The qualifiers will travel to Chicago, Illinois to attend the Grand National Tournament on Memorial Day hosted by the National Catholic Forensic League (NCFL). The annual competition will offer six forensic and four debate events. To qualify for nationals, Robinson competed at the Florida Gulf Coast Catholic Forensics League (FGCCFL) in late February.
Qualifying for Nationals is no easy task, so members gain practice and experience by attending several tournaments throughout the school year. Before these tournaments, the debaters prepared in many ways.
“Many people think that you can just sign up for extemporaneous speaking and compete right away. In reality, it takes a lot of practice and experience,” said President and Founder Ayan Nallamshetty (’25). “I’ve had to do many practice rounds, watch videos from national winners and research online on formatting an extemporaneous speech.”
On club days, the members split up and work on various skills based on their event. Melissa Golden, who teaches Chemistry for IB and traditional, is the club’s sponsor and coach. Since this year is Golden’s first year as a Speech and Debate coach, she has brought in an experienced debater to help.
“Coach Hunter, a previous speech and debate competitor and an extremely kind and helpful adviser, has helped me learn what I need to improve,” Nallamshetty said.
Nallamshetty qualified for one of the several competitions offered at Nationals: Extemporaneous Speaking. The event requires the competitor to perform a speech on a current event with limited time to prepare. This type of event focuses on the debater’s flexible persuasiveness to the judges. While researching for this event can be hard to prepare for, others choose events that take months to perfect.
Bella Musolino (’26) and Reid Taggart (’26) chose policy debate, a duo event requiring the preparation of evidence and structure. The duo has previously won three novice competitions before qualifying for nationals.
“We chose it so we could be a team and we got together at the beginning of the year to work on our affirmative and negative arguments, but we’ve changed them a lot since then,” Taggart (’26) said.
With their hard work, Speech and Debate continues to represent Robinson proudly.
“Now we get to go to Chicago in May for the NCFL nationals which will be very challenging and competitive but I’m looking forward to it,” Taggart said.
