For Parents and Students

Parent and Student Requirements

Parents are Key!  Vector Speech and Debate is a parent-led cooperative effort. This is not a drop-off activity, but instead requires a cooperative effort by our parents. Parents should:

• Attend and help run weekly meetings (icebreakers, speech drills, teaching and coaching) at least twice a month. Parents are routinely needed to give feedback to students as they craft and practice their speeches and debate cases.
• Attend the Novice Speech Camp-Orientation and/or Novice Debate Camp-Orientation offered by Vector coaches in early September.
• Judge at all tournaments in which your student participates. Usually 2 rounds of judging per student per event.
• Help with recruiting community judges for each tournament in which your student participates.
• Attend the Vector Tournament Planning meeting (held in November) and take on a role in running our tournaments in January, February & March.
• For all Vector-sponsored tournaments, parents are required to serve in a tournament job, and remain on-site to help for the duration of the tournament.

Students — Participation in Vector can be a rewarding and fulfilling experience!  There is a learning curve with speech and debate. In order for students to succeed, we strongly encourage students to do the following:

• (New students) Attend the Novice Camp & Orientation for Speech and/or Debate with at least one parent.
• Attend weekly meetings and complete assignments in a timely and excellent manner.
• Compete in a minimum of two tournaments for Speech and/or Debate. (i.e. Speech students will compete in two speech tournaments; Debate students will compete in two debate tournaments; students who are doing both will compete in a minimum 4 tournaments total during the year.)
• (Speech) Compete with at least one prepared scripted speech (Platform, Interp, and certain Wildcard events apply) and one limited prep event (Extemporaneous, Mars Hill, Apologetics).
• (Veteran Speech) Compete in Extemporaneous Speech at a minimum of two tournaments. Ideally, this event is well suited for Juniors & Seniors as college prep.
• (Debate) Compete in either TP or LD.  Debate students cannot do Parli without also doing a prepared debate event (TP or LD).

Tournament Links

See the Stoa calendar for the tournament schedule.