Delta College is hosting the State Championship Tournament for speech and debate March 8-11 in Sacramento at the Sacramento Marriott.
The tournament is usually held in the Bay Area, but Professor Kathleen Bruce, communication studies, put in a bid to host it this year.
“On even numbered years, it’s in Northern California, and on odd numbered years it’s in Southern California,” Bruce said. “But typically it’s a Bay Area school that hosts it, that’s typically who has hosted it in the past, and almost exclusively it’s been held in the Bay Area.
I just put in a bid for it. So we’ve never hosted it, so typically it gives your school like a lot of acknowledgment and it does a lot for name recognition, so that’s one of the incentives to host.”
The event would have been held at Delta College, but the campus and it’s classrooms aren’t big enough to hold an event as large as this one.
Stockton’s hotels aren’t ideal either.
“I probably could’ve asked University of the Pacific because they have enough classrooms, but the bigger issue was actually a hotel,” Bruce said. “There wasn’t a hotel large enough in the city of Stockton to house everyone that was needed. So you need about 400 hotel rooms and a ballroom that could fit about 400 people and there was no hotel that existed like that in the city.”
There will be a total of 14 events at the tournament, three of which are debate oriented and the other eleven are speech oriented.
There is also an event called the Reader’s Theatre, a theatrical presentation that’s put together by three or four people, according to Bruce.
“The easiest analogy I have for speech and debate is that it’s like a track and field team, where there’s a bunch of events,” said Bruce. “So you go to a track and field event and it happens over the course of a weekend and there’s like the long jump, the shot put, there’s the 200, the 800, the sprint and the relays, speech and debate is very similar.
There are a total of fourteen events that are going to be happening at the tournament, so obviously a competitor specializes in like two or three events, they don’t specialize in all eleven or thirteen. But there will be students that compete in each event.”
Bruce is currently the president of the California Community College Forensics Association and this will be her last year as president.
“I’m also directing that tournament,” Bruce said. “It’s a two-year term and this is my last year, so I’m going to be termed out after this.”
Judges are still needed for the tournament. Bruce is looking for judges that can meet certain requirements.
“So the requirements for judging, it’s one of two things or both. Either someone has a bachelor’s degree, or somebody that has at least two year’s experience in forensics in speech and debate,” she said. “We are looking to hire judges right now. I am in the process of hiring judges right now, I’ll probably need an additional like six or seven judges before the event starts.”
Students can attend and watch the tournament at the Sacramento Marriott.
