The Florida Forensics League state tournament is generally considered the premier speech and debate championship for Sunshine State residents. This year, though, my students told me it felt like a glorified local meet.
Before I became a coach, I competed out of Texas, where the idiom “Everything is bigger in Texas” most certainly applied to our debate state championship.
So when I arrived in Florida, despite expecting the tournament wouldn’t be as grandiose as the one in Texas, I was shocked at how small my event was. In extemporaneous speaking, the Florida state tournament had a field of fewer than 50 competitors; in Texas, the field was more than triple that.
I was stumped. Why did two states with similar educational priorities, as well as overall talent — Florida consistently produces national champions and finalists — have such large disparities in involvement at the pinnacle tournament of their debate leagues?
As an extracurricular, speech and debate is more popular and more impactful than ever before.
In Missouri, where speech is a required class, literacy rates have steadily increased. For Ketanji Brown Jackson, the youngest Supreme Court justice, speech and debate led her to apply to Harvard and to pursue a career in law.
For hundreds of thousands of students, including myself, it was an opportunity to have our voices heard — to feel as if, in a world full of turbulent voices blurting over each other, we had a chance to finally be heard.
So, where do those stark differences in involvement stem from? The answer comes down to Florida’s desire to be different.
The majority of states that fund speech and debate programs do so through grants. But in Florida, the state invests in its own alternative debate league: the Florida Civics and Debate Initiative. The league focuses less on debate skills and public speaking and more on civics education.
Backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the GOP, the FCDI succeeds in providing more access to speech and debate in schools using the state’s funding. At face value, this all seems like a step in the right direction, but the truth is the FCDI doesn’t model what speech and debate is meant to be.
Instead of allowing students to specialize in the events that interest them, it forces students to compete in at least three events, creating a learning curve: Younger competitors are demotivated, and older ones are locked out if they’re unable to learn the necessary structures and tactics.
Moreover, FCDI uses its own debate resolutions, preventing students from taking part in out-of-state or online tournaments and argumentative cross-pollination. The vast majority of online, U.S. and Taiwan-based tournaments use the NSDA resolutions, meaning everyone debates the same topics. These ensure students anywhere in the U.S., regardless of location and access to coaching, can find resources, research, arguments and help when debating specific subjects.
This open access is actually created and improved by students when organizations like Equality in Forensics publish free resources made for these globally shared resolutions. When the GOP prioritizes its own debate league rather than the standard adopted by the rest of the world, it forces programs without ample funding to steer away from the most intellectually accessible and recognized league in favor of a secluded, less rigorous experience.
Speech and debate is an international effort, where teams are motivated to compete against the best. That’s why tournaments like the NSDA national tournament, the National Individual Events Tournament of Champions and the Harvard National Speech and Debate Tournament amass such large crowds of debaters despite their distance from the majority of programs, especially those in Taiwan or the southwest U.S.
That’s why the grant system is so effective: It forces the entire speech and debate world to use the money back on itself. In fact, Florida Blue Key, the largest tournament in Florida, uses this philosophy when reallocating grant money to waive fees for struggling schools.
As Florida continues to create alternative systems for speech and debate, it alienates its brightest debaters from the rest of the circuit. At a time when the entire world seems to be becoming more polarized, when healthy debate is nearly impossible in public spheres and when violence against those we disagree with is the most normalized it’s ever been in American politics, FCDI is not the solution.
This year’s FFL was the smallest it has been in years, but the passion I see from the students I coach is the biggest it has ever been. As a coach, it pains me to know their success is not limited by their talent but by the rift the Florida Legislature has made in the largest competitive academic community in the country.
When will DeSantis, the Florida GOP and the FCDI get over their fear of working alongside those different from them so everyone can have a brighter, more opportune and better-debated future?
Contact Sasha Morel at smorel@alligator.org. Follow him on X @BySashaMorel.
Sasha Morel is a sophomore at the University of Florida studying Politics, Philosophy, Economics, and Law, as well as Anthropology. His returning column focuses on policy analysis surrounding domestic, global, and local politics, with a focus on targeting root causes of common issues and highlighting unrepresented perspectives. Outside of the Alligator, Sasha is a nationally recognized debate coach for high schoolers across the US.
