The first extracurricular activity I joined was FFA, also known as the National FFA Organization, or formerly Future Farmers of America. And while it wasn’t my pathway into speech and debate, I admire what FFA does for rural, more agricultural-incentivized schools like mine. My school doesn’t have a speech and debate team, so I have to drive 18 miles back and forth to the next town over. I’m very grateful to have that opportunity, but for most students in rural areas, it’s not feasible to do that. For example, students who attend Rangely High School would have to drive 118 miles to the nearest school with a speech and debate team. That’s where FFA comes in with the LDEs—Leadership Development Events.

The main speech events offered are extemporaneous public speaking and prepared public speaking. Those are the ones categorized as speech, but there’s also parliamentary procedure and creed speaking. Within our speaking events, I’ve read and watched incredible speeches (my favorite is Wyoming’s “Will It Ever Really Be Meat?”) and competed in both. But despite there being these amazing speeches and amazing speakers, there are practically no resources for the speaking events. Sure, you have the resources FFA provides, but oftentimes that’s not enough.

They tell you what to do, not how to craft a hook that grabs a judge in ten seconds or how to turn your extemp prep into a coherent, persuasive argument when your mind is racing. Most FFA advisors are agriculture teachers juggling livestock judging, swine showing, and so much more. Speech coaching? Advisors are spread too thin, and don’t get me wrong—they try the best they can—but when you’re doing so much at once, it’s hard to find time. On the other hand, in urban or suburban districts, debate kids get weekly practices and coaches who have perfected their craft within speech and debate. In rural chapters, you’re often self-taught, piecing together YouTube clips of past nationals and hoping your ag teacher can spare twenty minutes before the next chapter meeting. That resource gap isn’t just inconvenient; it’s a quiet barrier that keeps the best rural voices from ever being heard beyond the county fairgrounds.

For thousands of kids in schools without a speech and debate team, FFA’s LDEs are the only stage in town—extemp, prepared, judged on the same criteria as any urban circuit—yet they can’t reach their full potential. Imagine what those voices could do with the same coaching, the same practice rooms, the same shot.

And that’s exactly why FFA might just be rural debate’s best-kept secret. It’s not branded as a “speech team,” and nobody hands you a flowing handbook or a senior mentor who’s already gone to Nationals twice. Instead, you get something far rarer: a room full of kids who never planned on being public speakers suddenly discovering they can be. You get freshmen who signed up to learn how to weld or judge floriculture and somehow end up writing a six-minute persuasive speech about soil health or agricultural policy. You get students who would’ve never touched a podium if FFA hadn’t placed one right in front of them.

Imagine if rural kids had access to the same rhetorical tools as the schools with four assistant coaches and a bus full of novices. FFA could become not just an alternative, but a pipeline—a place where raw talent gets the same polish, the same mentorship, and the same investment as any speech and debate league in the country.

Because here’s the truth: rural students don’t lack skill, passion, or potential. They lack infrastructure. They lack someone telling them that their voices deserve to be trained, not just tolerated. In small towns, talent isn’t the issue. Access is. You could have a student who thinks critically, writes beautifully, and speaks so powerfully that they could rival any state finalist, but without a coach, without a team, without a space to practice or someone to teach them techniques, that talent stays hidden.

But when the nearest debate tournament is three hours away, when no teacher has the time nor money to run a speech program, when the only “public speaking training” you get is whatever you can Google, it creates a quiet, unfair ceiling on how far those abilities can take you.

It’s not a lack of ambition—it’s a lack of opportunity. And that’s the part people forget. Rural kids often have to work twice as hard just to access half the resources. They aren’t less capable; they simply don’t have the same opportunity.

What if the next national champion isn’t in a debate practice but in an ag class, waiting for the resources to catch up to the talent? We’d see champions emerging from places no one expects, from schools with 200 students. What if that next national champion is waiting for someone to believe in the power of their voice?

Sometimes the answers are small but meaningful: sharing resources online or creating spaces where rural speakers can practice and receive feedback without traveling hours to the nearest urban team. Steps like these give students the tools they need to grow.

So maybe the future of speech and debate isn’t found by creating more debate programs in the NSDA or other circuits, but by finally recognizing the power of the ones already hidden in plain sight and creating a world where every student, regardless of geography, has a real chance to speak, be heard, and realize the full power of their voice.