Moorpark College Forensic Team Off to Nationals

With hands full of notes and heads full of facts, the Moorpark College Forensic Team left Friday for the national competition it has won six times in 21 tries.

The 14-member team, which earlier this month hosted and won its 10th state championship, is off to the Phi Rho Pi National Junior College Championships in Odessa, Tex.

“Why are we so successful?” asked speech professor Richard Strong, who founded the team in 1971. “I think we just work harder than anybody else.”

In Moorpark, the work begins in July, when students planning to compete in debate events go to work on the research that eventually backs their onstage arguments. Returning members consult with the team’s four coaches in August and are joined by newcomers when school begins the following month.

Then the full team--about 50 strong before it is whittled down to the maximum 14 allowable in state and national contests--travels around the state to 10 or so competitions.

“If you’re an athlete, there are a thousand ways for you to go,” Strong said. “You can go and play hoops, play tennis, play baseball. And you can earn your fame in those sports and your college scholarship.”

“But what if you are incredibly talented and academically motivated but you aren’t an athlete? This is the only program that exists where a competition is conducted from the local level up to the national level and the criteria is brains and not athletic ability.”

Brandi Shearer, 23, of Simi Valley, is making the trip to the nationals for the second year in a row. Her events will include prose interpretation, persuasive speaking and informative speaking.

Shearer, who plans to transfer to USC in the fall and who dreams of one day anchoring the nightly news, took two gold medals at the national competition in St. Louis last year--helping Moorpark notch a third-place finish.

“I got plucked out of a Speech I class,” Shearer said. “The teacher said, ‘You’ve got to go out for our speech team.’ So I tried it and I liked it and I’ve been there ever since.

“I enjoy doing it, getting up in front of people and talking about anything. People have trouble trying to shut me up, anyway, so this is a perfect outlet for me.”

Another recruit from a beginning speech class is Rena Vander Heide, 19, of Newbury Park, who also joined the team last year and who won a gold medal in poetry reading at this year’s state competition.

Vander Heide will compete in five events, including poetry reading and drama interpretation. She said her role on the team has helped her more than just academically.

“The whole process of spending so much time and being diligent and memorizing 10-minute pieces at a time, it’s pretty much prepared me to work hard,” she said.

“More than that, it just helps me in any situation--interviews, any situation where I have to be my best. It’s helped me with my presence and just the way I carry myself. I have so much more confidence.”

Strong said one quality the top members of the team share is a willingness and ability to tackle almost Herculean amounts of work.

Students who compete in extemporaneous or current-events speaking are expected to read Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report every week and the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times from cover to cover every day.

Team members are often praised by other professors for their in-class performance, Strong said, which doesn’t surprise him.

“You get them on that kind of a reading program and it’s hard for them not to be at the top of their classes.”

And it is the determination to succeed that has brought the team consistent state and national recognition, Strong said. It will know whether it has won a seventh national title when the Odessa competition, which begins Sunday, closes April 3. Nearly 500 students from 80 colleges are scheduled to participate.

“If I had to pinpoint a quality, it would just have to be desire. The heart, the intangible things that make some people work themselves to a point of just incredible excellence,” Strong said.

“I have had people who, when I first saw them, I thought, ‘Oh, my Lord, there is no hope.’ But they were interested and they wanted to do it and they have ended up the best in America.”