Get to know a club is a column where students can read about the different clubs on campus.
TU’s Speech and Debate Club was officially recharted at the end of last semester and aims to serve both as a competitive speech and debate team as well as a community outreach based organization. While many of its members do participate in competitive tournaments, Jules Yang, secretary on the club’s executive team, characterizes the primary focus of the club as being “community oriented.” As a result, student executives encourage anyone to join or attend meetings regardless of previous experience. Increasing accessibility to Speech and Debate, Yang emphasizes, is a critical goal, with a large effort on behalf of the club being put toward teaching members how to participate in the events. Overall, the organization currently has around 30 active members, with about 10 consistent competitors. Typically, their competition season ranges from September to April, with the team intermittently competing in different tournaments throughout the year. Just recently, the team competed at Oklahoma’s Intercollegiate Forensic Association’s tournament hosted at TCC. By the tournament, TU’s competitive team ranked across several categories. Notably, the club’s president, Makayla Goode, ranked in the top four, and as second top speaker overall, while Vice President Luke Ontman ranked in the top eight, ranking third top speaker overall. Other rankings for the team included Anderson Bell and Kimberlee Wilson ranking top JV speaker, and second top JV speaker respectively. The club also plans to compete in another tournament over spring break in order to gain more competition experience,
Yang discussed some of the organization’s other goals, including the club’s plan to organize consistent general body meetings on campus. In the meantime students are welcomed to reach out to the President of the organization for any questions on how to get involved (meg8230@utulsa.com).
In the long term, however, the Speech and Debate club’s main goal is to overcome current funding obstacles faced by many organizations due to a massive slash in funding to SGA’s budget earlier this year. Their current DBC allotment fails to cover even basic expenses for the team such as registration fees and travel expenses. Additionally, this lack of funds prevents the team from hiring a coach, leaving many of the administrative duties to fall on the executive team. As a result, the Speech and Debate club plans to seek out additional funding to help supplement its travel and registration fees and hopefully hire an actual coach to help teach students new to the activity.
In terms of community outreach, the organization hopes to eventually hold a free tournament for Tulsa area high schools to compete in. Yang explained that many individuals often encounter accessibility barriers when trying to compete in Speech and Debate, and this would be an attempt to overcome those hurdles. An example of a barrier would be the registration fees required by many tournaments posing financial barriers for entry, additionally, Yang elaborates on the interconnected nature of many debate circuits saying, “Students from one circuit frequently get funneled into other circuits, it’s a lot about who you know.” Consequently, it can be difficult for teams just starting out to get their foot in the door, especially when they cannot afford to register in many tournaments or cannot afford a coach to advocate on their behalf. Experiencing lack of funding themselves, TU’s Speech and Debate Club is sensitive to these needs and hopes to use their role in the community to make the activity more accessible to local Tulsa students.
