Tournament Invitation

The 2025 National Speech Championship

With immense appreciation, you are invited to join us in Peoria, Illinois for the National Speech Championship on March 22nd and 23rd, 2025.

This tournament will provide an opportunity for teams of all resource levels to once again compete for a national team championship. The competition will be incredible and opportunities for both individual and team placement will abound. Congratulations to The University of Illinois at Chicago for winning the 2024 National Speech Championship.

Thank you to the hundreds of individuals who have supported The National Speech Championship over the years by competing, coaching, running the tournament, and judging. I also want to extend a thank you to all of you who will be joining us for the 2025 tournament.

The 2025 tournament will take place in-person at Bradley University.

Entry Fees

There will be no charge for any entries covered by judges. Teams are asked to provide enough judges to cover their entry. Each judge will cover five entries. Hired judges will be available at a rate of $40 per uncovered entry. If this fee prevents any team from attending the tournament, that team may contact the tournament director, Ryan Lauth, at info@nationalspeechchampionship.com, for a fee waiver. The tournament is happy to provide this fee waiver as a means to support forensics participation around the nation.

Entry Limits

Each team will be allowed a maximum of two entries per event. A single student may enter Duo twice if each Duo has a separate partner. A single student can be entered in each event, other than Duo, only once. There are no flight restrictions for individual students, however judges will be asked not to wait for competitors past the beginning of the following round in order to keep the tournament on schedule. There will be no qualification process necessary for entry.

The exception to the maximum limits are Interviewing and Group Improv. Each team may enter a maximum of five entries in Interviewing and one entry for Group Improv. Points will not be awarded for Interviewing or Group Improv.

Entries will be due via Speechwire.com by March 11th --- If you can enter earlier, please do so!

Novice

Students in their first year of collegiate competition are allowed to be entered as novice on speechwire. They will compete in the open division but will be eligible for novice exhibition finals only if they do not advance in that event to open elimination rounds. There will be no ranking of the novice exhibition final rounds. Instead, a moderator will run the round and offer only feedback on ballots. Novice final round competitors will be recognized during the awards ceremony. There will be no points awarded for novice final rounds.

Awards

Medals will be awarded to all elimination round competitors, including those in Interviewing. Traveling team trophies will be awarded to the top ten teams based upon points from elimination rounds. Each of these trophies will include the engraved names of the participating coaches and students from the team earning that trophy. The traveling team trophies will need to be returned to the tournament the following year. The top fifteen teams will also be awarded a team trophy that can be kept.

Recognition will also be given to the top three non-scholarship programs, the top three two year institutions, the top three programs directed by undergraduate students, and the top three programs directed by graduate students.

Scoring

No points will be earned in preliminary round competition. There will be two judges in each preliminary round. Elimination round placement will be determined based on each entry’s three best ranks. Only the highest placing entry from each team in each event will score points. Points will be determined by adding all of the elimination round placements along the following scale:

Quarter finals = 1point

Semi finals = 2points

6th place = 2 points

5th place = 4 points

4th place = 6 points

3rd place = 8 points

2nd place = 10 points

1st place = 12 point

A student winning an event will therefore earn 15 team points.

All teams will earn 20 points for attending the tournament.

Judge Policies

Requests from students

As has been done since the first National Speech Championship, the tournament will provide a full list of judges to all coaches during the week of the tournament and via speechwire (the Files to download section) on Friday evening. We ask that if your students have any conflicts with judges for non-competitive reasons that you let us know so we can block the judge from judging the student. This is an easy thing for us to do with Speechwire. Examples of when this could happen might include: the student is a family member/close friend of the judge, a student was harassed/assaulted by the judge, a student was a teammate of the judge, a student was coached by the judge. We absolutely respect the privacy of these decisions. Students can inform the tournament through their coach, or inform the tournament director directly at info@nationalspeechchampionship.com. The tournament director will not ask for details and does not expect any, we trust in the decision of the student. We hope that if a judge has participated in improper behavior that the tournament director be notified so that, if necessary, the judge can be removed from the judging pool before interacting with students, but it is not required if the student does not feel safe doing so.

Judge Limitations

We ask that judges not judge students or teams they have coached for, competed for, or been paid by (including working at summer camps but not including judging at tournaments) in the last four years. These blocks should be noted in the judge notes section when entering judges on speechwire.