Week 9 Post 1

An interview with Kay Rollins

Kay Rollins is the single longest competing person in high school speech ever. She gave her first speech when she was in fifth grade. Kay has had massive success during her time as a speaker. She is a Tournament of Champions winner. She was the top ranked speaker in the country for all last year. Perhaps most impressively, she did both of those things as a sophomore. I called her to discuss how speech and debate have played a role in her life and what benefits or detriments she thinks that has had for her.

M: Thanks for agreeing to sit down with me. Let’s start off easy, when did you first start thinking of speech as something you wanted to be involved in.

K: It’s hard to pin down one single moment. My dad was a national champion in international extemp and my older brother was a three time TOC [Tournament of Champions] finalist in mixed extemp so speaking has been a huge part of my life and family for as long as I can remember.

M: I know you gave your first speech as a fifth grader, when did you start doing speech in earnest?

K: Probably the summer after my year as a fifth grader. I knew I wanted to win MSNSDAs [Middle School Nationals] so I needed to get started early. I definitely had an advantage in that there were people in my home who knew how to teach me, so I wasn’t constrained by the lack of coaching and teaching at my school like most people are. I started competing in October of my sixth-grade year and I started travelling for competition as an 8^th grader.

M: When did you start seeing success?

K: Almost immediately. I was one of few middle schoolers being coached by a person with actual speech experience and not just a volunteer teacher. My parents had me start competing at the high school level in seventh grade and that’s where I really hit a road bump. It was a hard transition for me to go from winning all of these middle school tournaments to getting beaten by almost every high schooler at every tournament every weekend.

M: How did you get over that road bump?

K: Harry Strong started coaching at my school. He totally changed my style of speaking and I started beating people again. He also had me giving a speech per week which was way more than any middle schooler was doing at the time. I stopped going to middle school tournaments because they just weren’t worth it anymore. I also started succeeding at high school tournaments.

M: You were the first middle schooler to qualify for MBA right?

K: I think so, yeah. There could have been another one way back in history but if so I haven’t heard of them before.

M: Huh. Ok, after you qualified for MBA, you still got pushed back to the middle school level right?

K: Yep. All the post season tournaments; TOC, ETOC, NCFLS, and NSDAs have middle school divisions and don’t allow middle schoolers into the high school divisions. I was pretty upset about getting pushed back down.  I was even more upset when I heard other kids talking [expletive] about me for dropping back down to the MS level after MBA. But like I beat them all so it really doesn’t matter.

M: Was it hard for you to transition to the high school level after your 8^th grade year?

K: Not really. I’d say it was probably easier for me than for most freshies seeing as I had already competed at that level when I was in middle school. The only thing that was difficult for me to contend with was my reputation from being this little kid who had like won tournaments and done MBA and all that.

M: You’ve had a lot of success throughout high school, what do you attribute that to?

K: I’d say probably how much speech has been a part of my life. My family watches news broadcasts at dinner to help me stay up to date on current events, I take both a speech and a debate class at school, and I have a really good coach who is as much a family friend as a teacher at this point. I get disinterested with stuff pretty quickly so having this huge structure of speech around me has certainly made staying on top of things easier.

M: Alright, last question, do you think speech is a skill or a talent?

K: Assuming you mean skill as something that can be learned and talent as an intrinsic set of abilities that can’t be taught, I’d say it’s a skill. Like there are parts of it that are a matter of talent like I’m good at thinking on my feet and I don’t have a lisp or stutter but even then, neither of those is really applicable to real life speaking because outside of extemp you wouldn’t really have to think on your feet to write a speech and some of the best speakers I know have speech impediments. Everything else that it takes to give a good speech or heck even a just a speech can be learned without question.

M: Thanks for your time Kay!

K: Thanks for thinking of me, I hope it helped!