Posted on: Friday, April 18, 2003

Devotion will speak for itself

By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

The first time teacher Karen Miyakado took Hawai'i high school speech and debate champions to compete at the national tournament was in 1979. Mike Tanouye was a senior at Baldwin at the time, and he and debate partner Riki Fujitani represented Hawai'i in the varsity debate category.

All these years later, Miyakado has retired from teaching, and Tanouye and Fujitani are attorneys in their 40s, but they're all still right in the middle of high school speech and debate.

The truth is, they love it. The funny thing is, they won't admit it.

"Well, because, I'm a sucker," Miyakado answers when asked why she still volunteers for the Hawai'i Speech League. "They keep me on the board is what they do, the nasty people."

"I'm so stupid," says Tanouye. "It takes up so much time. It's not like sports where it's seasonal, at least. Speech is year-round."

Miyakado retired two years ago after teaching at Radford for what she laughingly refers to as "thirty-some-odd years." During her tenure at Radford, the school was a powerhouse in speech events and took the statewide debate championship several times. Now, the Radford speech and debate team is no more. No one could take Miyakado's place. "They died, but it was a real quick death," she says.

After graduating from Baldwin in '79, Tanouye went to UH-Manoa. He went straight from competing in to judging high school debate. All these years, his involvement in the speech league has been continuous. He coaches the Iolani debate team (Tanouye adds this disclaimer: "Baldwin tells me I'm a traitor, but if I lived on Maui, I'd coach for Baldwin!") and he serves on the speech league board, directing tournaments that sometimes go past midnight.

This year, 250 students from public and private schools on three islands competed in Hawai'i Speech League events. The work these kids put in to their presentations is amazing. The work their teachers and coaches put into these kids is unending. Then there are the hundreds of volunteer judges and timekeepers, and the die-hard Speech League volunteers who are simply too busy to get very sentimental about the whole thing.

"I guess you enjoy little things, seeing them compete and the excitement, seeing them work so hard. It's the spirit of competition," says Miyakado.

"I guess I see the value in it," Tanouye admits. "It certainly helped me. I think that it really teaches the kids to communicate well orally, even in writing, because a lot of these activities require good writing skills. And for them to think critically, I think it's really important."

On a story yesterday, we listed this year's champions. Behind those names, and the names of champions since the Hawai'i Speech League began in 1958, are the people who, despite protests to the contrary, lovingly do the work to put the competitions together.