This last weekend, I was lucky enough to compete in my first national speech tournament. However, the tournament had even bigger significance. Why? It was the first National Speech Championship tournament. Ever. The tournament was created this year to give colleges across the country an opportunity to compete on a national level, regardless of their team's size or their funding. Unlike NFA or AFA (the two largest national speech tournaments), there were no qualifications to compete in an event, meaning a person doing an event for the first time could compete with someone who had won that event multiple times. In addition, schools could only submit their top two entries in each event.

Why is this special? If you have a small team like mine that could only afford to travel to a couple tournaments during the year, there are fewer opportunities to qualify an event and to get feedback to improve your performance. In regards to the number of entries, a limit of two competitors meant that small teams with five or six students could have the same number of events at the tournament as a team with twenty or thirty students.

So why did this mean so much to our team? First of all, the EIU speech team consists of four competitors. The NSC allowed our team to feel equally represented and important, regardless of the fact that there were teams with twice or three times as many competitors. Second, the speech team, which was already struggling financially, took a major budget cut in the last year, which meant that our ability to go to nationals was not only determined by our ability to final at tournaments but also by our ability to raise the money we needed.

The first day at the tournament, EIU qualified every single one of its events into quarterfinals. The second day, eight events qualified for semi-finals and three events qualified for finals. For our team, having three events in national finals was incredible.

The weekend became even more incredible when our team got to take home a 6th place medal, two national champion medals, and a trophy ranking our team as 7th in the nation.

We do speech, first and foremost, because we love it. We love public speaking and we love performing. But loving an activity and feeling like it loved us back made it that much better. Everywhere we went, we were surrounded by kind and talented competitors, coaches, and judges. At the end of it all, we got to go home with some shiny new awards, a sense of pride for our small but mighty team, and an even stronger love for what we do.