The National Speech & Debate Association is launching its first middle school league in Los Angeles, and the first season starts in January 2027. High school students can help bring speech and debate back to the middle school they came from, and middle schoolers can help bring it to their own school, working with a parent.

Because this is the first season, anyone who earns the title this year is a Founding Ambassador. That name belongs only to this year's group. If you help bring a school in, you are also one of that school's Charter Ambassadors, the first to bring speech and debate there.

Become a founding Student Ambassador

Sign Up

Your job is to get a short meeting on the calendar between Mike and someone with the authority to bring the program to the school, usually a principal, assistant principal, or activities coordinator.

Before you reach out, we meet with you to work out how to use the contacts you already have, and we give you materials written to get a decision-maker interested.

Note: we will also ask a parent to sign a consent form.

Mike runs the meeting. He explains the program and answers the questions about budget, staffing, and space. You are welcome to join and say as much or as little as you want.

Scheduling that meeting is what earns you the title. Whether the school decides to join is our job, and it does not change what you earned.

Once the meeting happens, your part is finished, and we hope you keep going. Ambassadors who stay with their school help the new coach recruit students, show up at a first practice or an early meet, and become the person a school can ask when it is unsure about something.

What an Ambassador Does

What you get

You have the opportunity to give students something you found later than you wish you had, or something nobody at that school has had at all.

Student Ambassadors receive:

  • The Founding Student Ambassador title, along with a signed certificate

  • Charter Ambassador recognition for your school if you are the one who brings it in

  • A line for a resume or a college application that describes specific work you did to help launch a league

  • A part in starting the first NSDA middle school league in Los Angeles

For high school students, this work may count toward NSDA service recognition through your own chapter. Founding and Charter are titles the league gives. NSDA service points are separate, they are earned through your chapter, and you should check with your coach about whether this qualifies.

Ambassador Sign-up

Before You Reach out

We have spent our careers in this activity, and the same problems keep coming up. Coaches burn out. Tournaments that offer every event end up with divisions of three or four competitors. School administrators struggle to tell the events apart, or to work out which one fits what they want a program to do for their students.

This league is built around those problems, which is why it will look different from speech and debate you may have seen elsewhere. Four principles guide every decision we make.

Access.Speech and debate should be one of the activities a family actually weighs, alongside a sport or an instrument, at the age when students are working out what they are good at. Most families never encounter it until high school, so it rarely gets that consideration. A season has to be worth doing on its own terms. Some students will go on to compete in high school and some will not, and either way they leave having built arguments from evidence, written and delivered speeches, listened closely enough to answer someone, and held their ground in front of a room.

Sustainability. Most speech and debate programs die when a dedicated coach retires or burns out, because running a team takes more time and attention than most teachers can sustain. Replacing that coach is hard, since learning the sophistication of debate and the range of speech events is too much to ask of a new teacher. In this league there is one topic area for the whole season, every argument comes from a shared research packet we write, and the curriculum and practice plans come from us. Meets run two to three hours and never longer, most of them after school and a couple on Saturdays. The season has six meets, a clear start and end, and a half-day championship that follows the last one.

Predictable resource use. A school knows what it is agreeing to before it says yes. The hours are fixed, the meets have a known length, and there are only two events, so one coach can cover the whole team.

Competitive Equity. In many events a school that can pay for research help or hire argument coaches holds a real advantage. Every student here works from the same packet, so what separates competitors is how well they use the material rather than what their school could buy.

Those principles are why the league is narrow. A coach can keep doing this without it taking over their year, and if someone new has to take over the team, it is not an impossible ask. A school hearing about it for the first time is looking at something within reach.

The league runs Original Oratory and World Schools Debate. You may not be familiar with them, and that is fine. We will tell you all about both events when we chat. We ask that you speak positively about them and do not compare them with other events. If a school asks about running a different format, send that question to Mike, and he’ll be happy to explain the logic of the format limits.