Edna duos Kyle and Tiffany Zheng, and Krystin Nieto and Violet Khan earned the top two spots at the National Speech and Debate Association competition in La Vernia, and will be able to compete at Nationals on June 14-19 in Richmond, Virginia.
The win has put Edna High School on the map for NSDA nationals, where 7,000 students will compete over 750 classrooms. Often referred to as the Olympics of Speech & Debate Contests, they will compete against the best of the best.
Now, the students, their families and their coach, Mark Ruiz, are looking for and accepting donors to help them get to nationals. Had it not been for an anonymous $1,000 donation, they wouldn’t have been able to get to the district in La Vernia.
“Where UIL is for the state of Texas, NSDA is national,” Ruiz said. “So everything has been a string of firsts for these guys, it’s all brand-new and exciting. These guys were the only ones from 3A, and competed against 4A and 5A schools.”
The Zheng sibling and Nieto are all seniors, but Khan is just a sophomore, and now one of the new leaders for speech and debate for the next school year.
“This year I was supposed to LD debate, but then Krystin came and she didn’t have a partner, and I was so fortunate to have someone so experienced and be able to learn from her,” Khan said. “So I was kind of thrown into into CX.
“I’m so nervous about next year and finding a new partner, I realize I’ll have to be the Krystin for someone else,” Khan added.
LD is Lincoln-Douglas debate which is one on one, where CX, cross examination, is done in teams.
Nieto had only amazing things to say about Khan. “Violet is amazing, I loved having her as a partner. Coming from Industrial, it was hard finding the right partner. It was really stressful for me and I went through some people, but she and I clicked. She jumped right into evidence research, cutting cards, making arguments, and writing full cases by herself. So she immediately got to work and we both had a great work ethic together. We could work off each other and bounce ideas around.”
The Zhengs were able to learn a lot more strategies from last year to this year.
“We didn’t have a good division of labor between us, so we ended up doing the same things, but I think this year we branched into our roles, and said you do this and I’m supposed to do this,” Tiffany said.
“UIL is more traditional debate, you would have your stock issues and cases you would normally see. The ideas built around the case are pretty genetic, where with nationals, one particular case we hit, we’d never heard about it before.”
Kyle agreed, saying the cases at nationals could be anything, or not even be a case at all. It could be a critique on what we’re debating, like, ‘Should we even be debating this?’” Ruiz nodded. “More philosophical.”
Nieto said she’s been able to attend state for CX before, but she’s seen a huge difference from where she was to where she is now.
“I think there’s a whole lot more support for Edna’s debate team, we all work together, even though we’re ‘competitors,’” she said. “It makes us a lot stronger and it’s helped all of us develop. Even Violet was learning more than everyone else because not only was she learning CX, she was learning all these strategies and new ways to debate.”
The teams are preparing for the UIL state competition, which will be held in a week, but the Zhengs are definitely ready for it with their thinking caps on.
“I don’t think the pressure gets to me, because I know this stuff, I’ve done it before, I just have to do better than last year,” Tiffany said. “Since my brother and I have been a team for so long, we know what we need to work on and we know our growth. We know what our path is and we’re going to see where that goes.”
Kyle extended his and the teams’ thanks towards Coach Ruiz and the administration for allowing them to compete in these sorts of competitions.
“I’m really excited for the path ahead for us, further down from the state and national competition. This year, I feel like I’ve grown a lot in speech and debate,” Kyle said.
The students wanted to emphasize inviting the community to their first annual speech and debate extravaganza, a free event which will be on Thursday, April 9, at the EHS auditorium. The doors open at 5:30 p.m. and the event begins at 6 p.m.
“It gives us an opportunity to celebrate the seniors,” Ruiz said.
“The extravaganza is also about the junior high kids, and getting them interested in speech and debate for high school, because we want the program to expand and encourage the younger ones,” Nieto said.
