Basic mathematics can easily quantify the magnitude of the Class A Divisional Speech & Debate Tournament that will take place Saturday afternoon at the Ronan Events Center.

The all-day tournament will feature over 200 participants from 12 area schools and volunteer judges that will devote over 250 volunteer hours towards judging seven speech categories, six drama categories and three debate categories.

For the Ronan Speech & Debate team, the road to competing may be just a little harder than some of the established Class A teams with higher enrollment, such area teams as Columbia Falls, Polson and Whitefish.

The Ronan speech & debate team has to work twice as hard in order to remain competitive with some area schools they will be competing against that have three times the enrollment as they do. Speech & Debate, whose governing body is the Montana High School Activities Association, had to move from Class B to Class A as part of the late 2016 reclassification effort that took effect during the 2017-2018 school year for various competitive sports.

Ronan and Libby were the two Class A schools that had to move up because of the reclassification, no different than their athletic counterparts.

This makes earning and scoring points even more difficult for their team and it makes it more difficult for them to accumulate points against schools that have a larger number of participants to choose from.

“To compete is very challenging and numbers again are earned by sweepstakes points,” Chiefs’ coach Stephanie Swigart said

Earning some of these sweepstakes points on a smaller team can be a challenge.

“The more students that you have, the more the likelihood that you will earn sweepstakes points,” Swigart said. “If you have one student in each event and the other team has three students in the event, the likelihood of scoring points is significantly higher. If all performances are equally as good, the judges rank the students accordingly. We really have to have a high-caliber performance to get an overall placement in the tournament.

In order to alleviate some of the pressure of performing well, Swigart, who coached for four years under former Ronan Speech & Debate coach Amy Miller, developed a team motto to make things fun for their team.

“We just focused on the kids and said they have to beat their own personal bests,” Swigart said. “We have to encourage our students to do their best and have fun. Our students get to develop their craft to the best of their ability. For some of the students, it will be their last tournament ever and they are absolutely proud of themselves if they meet their goal.”