First-year graduate assistants Victoria Ledford and Garrett Walker will lead the award-winning, eight-member team to the Pi Kappa Delta National Comprehensive Tournament in Lexington, Kentucky, March 17 to 20, and to the National Forensics Association National Speech and Debate Tournament in Muncie, Indiana, April 14 to 18.
Ledford, who lead the team to the fifth consecutive state tournament championship last year, said she feels “pretty prepared.”
“Danny spent the last year teaching me how to run tournaments and how to run the team,” Ledford said. “Even when I joked with him about how I didn’t want to do his job, he’d say, ‘Well, one day you might do it,’ and one day I’m doing it.”
“It’s kind of impossible to fill Danny’s shoes; it’s more of just trying to collectively fill them,” Walker said. “Danny was kind of our rock and our foundation. Now, without him, Victoria and I have had to really step up to that place and take on that parental role that Danny gave all of us on the team.”
“We compete regularly in 11 individual speaking events in categories ranging from limited preparation, public address and oral interpretation,” Ledford said. “The type of debate we do is called Individual Public Debate Association debate, and in that form of debate, you do not know what you’ll be debating until you get to the tournament.”
Last year, the Thundering Word placed 13th in the nation out of more than 80 colleges and universities, 4th in its team division, and had a national finalist (Ledford) for the first time in 40 years.
For more information about the Thundering Word, visit www.marshall.edu/commstu.
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Photo: Members of Marshall University’s Thundering Word speech and debate team pose for a photo following their performance at the National Forensics Association tournament in 2015.