Each year, schools across the United States bring their top speech and debate students to compete in the National Speech & Debate Tournament. This tournament showcases the next generation of leaders and advocates. According to the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA), its vision is “a world where every school provides speech and debate programs,” helping build students’ communication, collaboration and creative thinking. 

Members of the S’Pekin Dragons team unanimously agree that both of these girls are more than qualified for this tournament. 

Cameron Volpert, Junior at PCHS says that “they both have such incredible personalities, energy, and work super hard for what they do.”

This year, Wiley’s main event will be Informative Speaking, and Vansaghi’s will be Program Oral Interpretation. Wiley and Vansaghi will be competing with over 200 students in their main events and over 400 students in their secondary events. 

Even though Vansaghi is a freshman, she has already moved from the junior varsity team to varsity. 

Vansaghi expresses how hard she has worked to get here, “every night I would come home and just practice to be the best I possibly could. I knew going in it would be tough, but I was just excited that I was guaranteed one more day of performing because I wasn’t quite ready to let the season go yet and now thankfully I don’t have to.”

Vansaghi is not the first in her family to attend this competition; her sister, Sophie Vansaghi, also performed in the tournament as a S’Pekin Dragon. The younger Vansaghi watched her sister perform for years, and she feels that it taught her a lot and encouraged her to join speech.

Sophie Vansaghi says that “as a former S’Pekin Dragon myself, who has also had the opportunity to attend the national tournament, I know the level of commitment it takes to get to this point of success. Competing at the national level places you within the highest bracket of talent that expands across the entire country. Mia putting herself there as a Freshman, being one of the only people in Pekin history to do so, is a revolutionary accomplishment.” 

Wiley, on the other hand, is in her third year of speech. As someone who is known as outgoing, Wiley shares that she struggles with stage fright. Her coach, Scott Pyle has really helped encourage her and keep her accountable. Prior to this year, Wiley only focused on humorous acting events like original comedy, humorous interpretation and humorous duet acting.

This year, Wiley decided to do something different. 

She explained that she “wanted to give this event a try for a while, because I had a personal and impactful topic I wanted to do: polycystic ovary syndrome. It’s a disorder that I and a lot of the women in my family have, and I felt it needed more representation.”

Since Wiley has never done informative speaking, she didn’t expect anything to come from it. Nonetheless, Wiley still managed to put herself out there, leading to her qualifying for the tournament. 

“I thought about how hard I had to fight to be diagnosed with PCOS because of its stereotyping and underrepresentation, and how exuberated I was that I’d get to spread my message even further,” shares Wiley.  

Both of these ladies put in the work to get where they are now, and that is something they deserve to be recognized for. Doing what most people are too scared to do: public speaking. Congratulations Vansaghi and Wiley as you head on to the tournament this summer!