Youth sees benefit of speech contests

March 8, 2008 at 12:35a.m.

The winner said the experience has given him greater confidence.

COLUMBIANA —¬† Anthony Lopez is poised, polished and, above all, articulate.

Lopez, 15, a sophomore at Columbiana High School, is also a winner.

He recently took first place in the Ohio High School Speech League State Tournament at Medina High School, competing against 51 others in the prose and poetry category.

Prose and poetry may not appear to be heavyweights when it comes today’s ever-changing jargon.¬†

But think of Harvard. Think of Yale.

Allison Giannini, a teacher at Columbiana High School and its head speech and debate coach, said those two universities want to see speaking experience.

“It’s the No. 1 thing they look at,” Giannini said.

Giannini participated in speech competitions while she was a student.¬†Columbiana’s speech program, she said, had gone by the wayside and she was asked to revive it two years ago,

Some eight students qualified for the state competition this year.

Participants create a “cutting” — copies of what they will read. And their participating can be trying.

“It means getting up every Saturday at 5 a.m. and traveling to a¬† different school,” Giannini said. “You start at 8 a.m. and sometimes go to 3 to 5 p.m., or even 7 p.m. The students go through three rounds in eleven categories.”

Lopez, like the others students, gives the same presentation in each round.

When he was approached to join the team, Lopez declined.¬†

“I decided the speech team was uncool,” Lopez said.

But he changed his mind.

“At my third tournament, I started to realize that I enjoyed it. I could be passionate about it,” Lopez said.

For a student with just a year of experience, “He’s extremely talented,” Giannini said.

Lopez chose three works. One is the poem, “Paint Brush” by Betty B. Young, that describes coats of paint as emotional¬† covering.

One verse reads:

“Now my coats are all stripped off,

I feel naked, bare and cold.

And if you still love me with all that you see,

you are my friend, pure as gold.”

The second part was was based on an anonymous poem, “There’s Someone Walking Behind You.” The third was from “The Laramie Project” by Moisaes Kaufman, a play based on a real murder and personal secrets.

Lopez realized that he is not interested in reading literature as much as he was interested in bringing different works together.

Before joining the team, Lopez said he was shy. But the speech events gave him confidence.

“You have a better sense of who you are, your life and everyone else. That’s what it did for me,” Lopez said.

The experience also helped him to increase his vocabulary and changed the way he talked to people.

The young man looks people directly in the eye and speaks clearly and calmly.

“My parents can see the difference,” he said.

Lopez is going places in more than one way. He and his family are moving to Texas on Monday.

But Giannini and Trisha Nord, the assistant speech coach¬† and a Columbiana teacher, hope they’ll see him again — at the national competitions.

wilkinson@vindy.com