Once again, The Post has failed. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised. Let me explain myself: I am on the Bobcat Forensics team, a team that has been honored by the Board of Trustees and the best team on this campus.
That’s not just my bias talking. Our team boasts close to 20 total national team championships, almost 70 individual national championships, not to mention countless state and regional tournament championships for both the team and individual competitors.
In the past six years (as long as our current coach has been here), we have been transformed from a small team without a chance at anything to the fifth place team in the country. What’s our basketball team ranked going into next year? 25th. Our football team? Not even ranked.
From last Thursday to Monday, the Ohio University Speech and Debate team hosted and competed in the National Forensics Association National Championship Tournament.
When the dust settled, OU was tied for the fourth-most quarterfinalists with Illinois State University, converted 11 of our 16 breaks to semifinals and ended with five finalists.
Two of our seniors won the National Championship in Duo Interpretation, an event that has students compete with a 10-minute cutting of a play, novel or some sort of dramatic script — but says that they cannot touch, look at each other, or really interact with each other except for the dialogue. We also took third in Duo and Poetry Interpretation and fifth in Persuasive Speaking and Forensics Criticism.
But we’ll go ahead and let our independent, student-run paper run a story about High Fest, further devaluing our degrees to the point that any employer or graduate school admissions officer will laugh in our faces. That’s all that people see when they think of OU — people — and, until we change our paper’s rhetoric, we will only be known as the party school.
To The Post: come on. The speech team is bringing prestige back to our university, and you have been ignoring us for the better part of the past few years.
You didn’t cover us two years ago when we not only hosted the tournament, but then-senior Dan Glaser got the most points of any single competitor in the tournament. You didn’t cover us when we won the Pi Kappa Delta National Tournament twice in a row. The most we’ve gotten was a mini-blurb in the online edition in spring break. No competitor or coach interviews, no announcements of the individual winners, nothing.
It’s not much that I ask for. I just want a little bit of publicity for the team that knows how to beat ALL of our rivals consistently. We haven’t lost to Miami or Ohio State in five years. We’ve been in the top 10 nationally for six of the past 11 years. We know how to win.
Considering what we do for this school, the least you can do is cover us.
Tom Pinney is a junior studying political science.
