FBLA and Speech & Debate… sound pretty different don’t they? Because in truth they are. FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America) focuses on promoting, marketing, and managing a business, while Speech & Debate prioritizes on bettering people with speaking and debating. They also function differently as well, since FBLA competes at a national level and Speech & Debate does so at a tristate level. There’s a lot of others that could be gone into bit by bit, but Speech & Debate definitely has skills that can be used outside of the box and that of the business environment.

    For starters, the number one fear people have, above death, is public speaking. FBLA does provide public speaking as an event, but not at the level Speech & Debate provides since there is more than one kind of speech. The speeches that can be done within Speech & Debate range from prose reading, debate, and Libel, an event created for non-native English speakers.

    There’s multiple reasons for Speech & Debate not being as well know, the big one being that the team preps from meets once a month from October up until early March.

    “The main problem’s we’re facing is that we just have so many things to do from fund rising to competitions to just getting people ready for debate,” said senior Brandon Czel, this year’s president of Speech & Debate who’s now in his fourth year of competing with the team.

    FBLA, however, is not to go without some praise. It does help students build a strong academic resumes and provide ways for students to help out in their local community.

    “Those academic resumes are really what colleges are looking for,” said Adriann Hardin, FBLA’s coach and teacher at Centennial. “They just don’t want to see a kid who takes AP and sports. They want to see kids who do AP, sports, and [who] are heavily involved in everything.”

    There is one fact that can’t really be missed, and that is public speaking is used for everything including talking to people at interviews, speeches in class and in the work place, and even for advertising and marketing. Plus the fact that public speaking can be bettered is something that these teams are all about: bettering their skills to aim high in competitions. With Speech & Debate, they’re not only improving their speaking abilities but also finding loop holes in arguments through debate and keeping up with the current day news. They also promote creativity in finding and creating new speeches to use.

    FBLA does teach students how to succeed in business and helps the community around them in order to learn these valuable skills, but Speech & Debate can replace fear with fun in public speaking.