Advice for the head coach

1. Have an assistant coach manage the logistics of the program (e.g., tournament signup, coordinating volunteers). This will let you spend time with the speakers and program.
2. Build a strong parent boosters program. Look to the parents as more than just judges and chauffeurs, they can be the biggest champions of your entire program – this helps make fundraising easier, increases student involvement, and builds momentum for increased year-over-year success.
3. Remember to brag about your achievements. Whether you’re doing a “speech spotlight” (an after-hours event for the parents and friends to see the speakers perform), including achievements in PTO newsletters, or telling your newspaper about recent wins, celebrating these achievements helps builds program credibility and showcases the results of your hard work.
4. Keep a list of your alumni. There’s a natural lifecycle of speech engagement. There’s a brief spike for first-year graduates and a lull for the next six years. After that, the alumni that stayed in your community can become great assistant coaches by combined their past experiences with recent life lessons.
5. Maintain a shared, digital library. When you’re judging and hear a great speech, write it down. From February to May, we all think about the now. Creating a digital library, and sharing write-access with your assistant coaches, provides a great launchpad for next season when it feels like you can’t find a humorous piece anywhere…
6. Setup Slack (or something like it). Requiring your students to use a common communication platform, like Slack, helps them learn skills that’ll transfer to the real-world (e.g., when work forces everyone to use Teams). They’ll want to use chat or GroupMe, and after a couple years getting access to the team Slack or Discord will become a rite of passage.
7. Keep a scratch pad of half-baked ideas for each category. Keeping a spark file is a great way to remember the ideas that are either overdone in the moment, ahead of their time, or missing some unknown to become great. Share read access to the spark file, and it’ll amaze you the fires it starts.
8. Be aware of your budget. The student fees should go to more than buses and coaches. Remind the Info students that you’ve got their back, and solicit ideas of books the team would like to be reused year after year.

Some of my favorite material

I’m not organized enough to share all my favorite, but here are some of my favorite books and videos to pull from:

• [Great Speeches] Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2014 UN Climate Summit Speech
• [Humorous] Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America (warning: you’ll need to censor a lot of swearing…)
• [Dramatic Duo] YouthPLAYS has a great collection (make sure you support the authors and buy when required)

Have other material you’d recommend, or disagree with some of my advice? Let me know.