OK be in a meeting anyway I’ll finish that up tonight. There’s something wrong with Kates family decided to stay in a towel over here. OK be in a meeting anyway I’ll finish that up tonight. There’s something wrong with Kates family decided to stay OK play the towel over here.    This past week, I had the privilege of judging a national speech and debate competition hosted by Oral Roberts University. I was thoroughly impressed by the character and talent of the young people who competed.

It was the National Invitational Tournament of Champions (NITOC) for Stoa, which is a Christian Homeschool Speech and Debate league.

I received an email through the ORU alumni association asking for volunteers in the Tulsa area who would like to give a few hours of their week to judge this competition. There were close to 1,000 students from middle school through high school in the competition, so over 100 volunteers were needed to adequately staff each of the dozens of sessions and rounds of the competition. The goal was to have three judges for each session and nine for the finals, and thanks to the parents and local volunteers that goal was met.

Being a broadcaster, speaker and actor, this opportunity really appealed to me, especially to be able to judge the speech categories. I didn’t have much interest in judging the debate formats, so I stayed away from those.

There are several types of speech categories in the competition including open interpretation, duo interpretation, humorous interpretation, apologetics, extemporaneous, Mars Hill, and many more. I stuck with open, duo and humorous. My schedule would only allow me to judge a few days, and I ended up judging a first-round session, two second round sessions and one of the finals.

Some of the kids did a great job using their voices to create the characters, using their bodies to portray the action of the story, and using facial expressions to present the emotions of the characters. Overall, it was very entertaining for me to sit there and watch these performances. Admittedly, not all were stellar. There were some that fell flat or didn’t quite hit all the specific points that were on the judges’ score sheets. At times, I caught myself watching these performances from a director’s point of view, watching their actions and emotions and not paying attention to the story itself.

The majority of the performances were very good, in fact, there were some that blew me away, and I told them so on their score sheet. Some of these young people might truly have a career in acting. Their ability to tell the story using different voices, accents, body movements and facial expressions were spot on. My most common criticism was they didn’t speak loud enough; they didn’t project their voices. They spoke as if the judges sat only six feet away, and we did, but they needed to speak to the back of the room or as if they were in a large auditorium.

I was one of nine judges who judged the finals of open interpretation. There were eight students who made the finals. The top five, in my estimation, made it extremely difficult to rank them 1-5. My top three finishers were very close. The bottom three made it difficult to rank them 6-8. Not that they were all bad, but because they were very close in score. None of the eight were horrible, or else they would not have made it through several rounds in the week to get to finals. It’s a good thing there were nine judges to average out the rankings, because it was honestly a very tight competition. I’m interested in seeing the results and who the winner was but as of this writing, they have not been made public on the website yet.

It was very refreshing to see so many young people interested in public speaking. In this day of texting and emails, it’s becoming a lost art to stand in front of a room full of people and deliver a message. This is something these young people may have to do many times in their careers; whether it’s in front of a congregation, a board of directors, a panel of doctors, patrons of a theater, or whatever. I realize not all careers require speaking in public and some jobs are more isolated, however, the vast majority of these young homeschool students will likely end up in jobs where they will be leaders, managers, or business owners.

That makes me feel good about our future as a nation. Sure, they were just a small sampling of the students in school today, but this small sample of students will be the ones hiring and training the other students who don’t have these skills. That’s how the world works, and that is why this competition was so important.

I was honored to be a small part of it.

TULSA BEACON RADIO

Tune in to “Tulsa Beacon Weekend” radio show every week, featuring interviews with local and national guests, talking about everything from politics to family issues. This week my guest will be author, speaker, movie producer and director Phil Cooke. The show airs on Saturday at 12:00 p.m. CST on 970am KCFO.