After taking a break from competitions for a few years, the BHS speech and debate team is bigger than ever and prepared to accomplish big things.

The team increased from six members last year to over fifteen this year. This is a far better turnout since the team first started in 2008.

The student captains this year are juniors Ori Balkan and Alex Eisengart as well as sophomore Lyndia Zheng. Coach Nicole Majercak credits the student leaders as a reason for the team’s growth this year. 

“We have a very avid leadership between Ori, Alex and Lyndia; they seem very eager to pull people into the team,” she said.

Majercak brings a successful record as a speech and debate coach. 

She started coaching at Beachwood in 2008, then moved her coaching career to Solon for five years and is now back at Beachwood. 

In between, the team was coached by ELL/Title I teacher Erica Stubbs for four years. 

Over the past five years, Majercak led Solon’s team to great success, winning the state championship two years in a row. She hopes to match that success at Beachwood.

Majercak says that many freshmen have joined Beachwood’s team this year, and many new members were motivated to participate after hearing of the success their friends found in the activity while competing at other schools. 

Speech and debate involves many different activities, one of which is congressional debate. Although speech and debate competitions and Model UN conferences both focus on speaking skills, they are very different activities. 

Eisengart explains the difference between Model UN and speech and debate.

“The main difference between Model UN and speech and debate is that there are so many different topics you can do in debate,” he said. “You can choose your own topics, you could write your own speech or you could debate.” 

Competitors in speech events can choose their own topic that interests them, such as the topic that freshman Eva Zheng is looking forward to presenting.

“I’m planning on speaking about how interest connects to learning, and the importance of engaging students during the learning process,” Zheng wrote in a text message.

Additionally, many people don’t understand that speech and debate are not interchangeable. 

“Debate and speech events both require a developed skill set of persuasive and rhetorical writing skills as well as excellent speaking skills,” Majercak wrote in an email. “Speech events involve ten minute speeches written over many weeks and fully memorized prior to tournaments with the same speech typically used all year.” 

Debate events, on the other hand, involve extensive research on assigned topics and multiple short speeches, most of which are written and delivered within the rounds to respond to opponents’ arguments. 

“Debaters will usually have to make at least eight unprepared speeches each tournament and up to sixteen (sometimes more) depending on event and tournament,” Majercak added.

Speech and debate tournaments involve many competitions occurring all at once, similar to track and field meets.

“There will be 50 or 60 rooms of competitors all competing in different events at the same time with their own judges,” she said. “There are several speech events, several debate events and some considered ‘hybrids.’” 

“Local competitions involve maybe 200 plus competitors from [around] 20 different schools,” she added. “State and national competitions that Beachwood’s team has attended in the past and that happen all year, like Yale and Emory, can involve over a thousand kids from more than a hundred schools.”

Bison speech and debate competitors will attend their first tournament on Saturday, Dec. 16 at Kenston High School.

The speech team practices every Monday after school from 3:30-4:30, and the debate team practices every Tuesday after school 3:30-4:30.