Falcon Forensics, Speech and Debate Wins the Ohio State Novice Championship

Bowling Green State University’s (BGSU) Forensics, Speech and Debate Team won the Ohio State Novice Championship hosted by the Ohio Forensics Association at Ohio University. The team competed in 35 events and received final-round placement for each of those events for a historic 100% breaking average. BGSU won the State Novice title in each of the 12 events that were offered at the competition.

Additionally, four of the top overall speakers were from BGSU, with Vaughn Cockayne earning the title of best novice speaker in the state of Ohio. Under the direction of Paul Wesley Alday, director of forensics and debate, the team is completely comprised of novice first-year members, making it one of the youngest teams in nation.

“I’m really excited because this year all of our success has been with freshmen and novices and first-year only students. We don’t have any upperclassmen on the team, so we’re really one of the youngest teams in the nation. And so if we continue to grow I can see us getting back up into the national ranking rapidly” said Alday.

The team received state titles for Extemporaneous Speaking, Impromptu Speaking, Communication Analysis, Informative Speaking, Persuasion, After Dinner Speaking, Duo Interpretation, Dramatic Interpretation, Prose Interpretation, Poetry Interpretation, Program Oral Interpretation and Improvisational Duet Acting.

During the previous weekend, the team won the Marshall University portion of the University of Kentucky/Marshall University swing tournament. The team has now won both the State Championship and the top quality team award during the season.

“Every tournament that we’ve gone to, we’ve gone to 14 of them, the team has placed somewhere in the top 5 at those tournaments. So we’ve brought home an award each weekend that we traveled. We have qualified in over 45 events for nationals this year. The team will be headed to Pensacola, Florida to participate in the novice national tournaments in about a month, and we’re hoping that we can be successful there” said Alday.

The Falcon Forensics, Speech and Debate Team is a co-curricular, competitive team available through the School of Media and Communication and the Department of Communication to all BGSU undergraduate students in good academic standing. Students prepare speeches, debates, and interpretive performances for competitions amongst students from other collegiate institutions. They are the oldest competitive performance, speaking and debate organization at BGSU, and the first forensics organization at the University to be recognized nationally.