Raw and unconventional, Renton debate team makes a statement

Enunciation, posture, footwork — all of that, you can teach.

It's the things you can't teach that earned Renton High School students the 3A championship last night in the state high-school speech and debate tournament. And that will send three of them to Philadelphia in June, for the national high-school speech tournament.

No one expected any of it — not yet, barely four months since any of them started competing. Not them, not their coach, not anyone who realized that for the first time in 36 years, Renton High School had an officially registered speech-and-debate squad. But from the beginning, Renton's diverse group has defied its limited training, winning judges over with unconventional performances.

"It's not, look what they've overcome," coach Rebecca Shepherd says. "It's, look what they've done. They're competing against kids who have been competing for four years. And here they are."

Think debate and the image is Lincoln vs. Douglas, two people pitted head to head in argument. But of the 13 categories sanctioned for academic competition by the National Forensic League, eight involve not debate, but theatrical and persuasive presentation. The words speech and debate are used interchangeably to encompass all 13 categories.

It's the nondebate, or individual, events that Renton students have targeted at far-flung weekend tournaments involving dozens of other schools. For instance, in dramatic interpretation, junior Jasmine Spence channeled a troubled 14-year-old from Rebecca Carroll's "Sugar in the Raw," while juniors La'Terria Powell and Jamilia Tyler, in duo interpretation, mined the Alice Walker novel "Meridian" for a powerful look at racism.

Only the top two or three in each event receive trophies — and heading into the national-qualifying tournament at Mukilteo's Kamiak High last weekend, Renton had earned nearly 30 of them in six outings.

The victories are all the more remarkable when you recall that these are novices, facing competitors with far more experience, programs with far prouder histories — and when you consider Renton's multiethnic, economically diverse population against the backdrop of an activity usually linked with white, upper-class students and schools.

Yesterday, Renton capped its amazing maiden season by winning top 3A/2A honors at the Washington State Individual Events Tournament at Tacoma's University of Puget Sound. La'Terria and Jamilia took first in duo interpretation, fellow junior Rihana Saucier was state champ in dramatic interpretation, and junior Baillie Brown won first in humorous interpretation.

Like other extracurriculars, debate boosts confidence and college opportunities, but it also teaches poise and public-speaking skills so advantageous later in life. Yet its ranks are still lacking in students of color. "We're definitely not where we'd like to be in bringing speech activities to a diverse community," says J. Scott Wunn, the forensic league's executive secretary.

So if Renton's students have made it look easy, it hasn't been. Their unabashed, urban-flavored splash in an unfamiliar world initially made them a focus of curiosity, even antagonism.

"Unfortunately, debate is not very diverse," says Dawna Lewis, who coaches a team in Edmonds. "And I don't just mean racially. It's a limited segment of society."

For Shepherd, 35, that's one more reason her kids needed to participate. They're mostly average students who've put in six-day work weeks, supporting each other through all-day Saturday tournaments and lengthy after-school practices.

Word from "Shep"

In the days before the Mukilteo tournament, Room 315 at Renton High is a raucous blend of hip-hop style and familial rapport. A smattering of hoodies, sports jerseys and lustrous sneakers, with coach Shepherd, or "Shep," skillfully spinning the mix.

The kids like to mimic her language: I need you to get serious NOW! Why do you want to be a distraction? Excuse me — EXCUSE me! We are a TEAM! To which Shep, with her blue-painted fingernails and glasses that slip to nose's edge, might reply with the feigned anxiety of a sophomore, "Shut up!"

"She makes you feel like you can open up to her," senior Emanuel "Manny" Russell says, "so she can see you as you are."

On days they can stay for practice, as late as 7 p.m., students watch or do homework as they wait their turns. Moms deliver take-out.

Among those here today, Jasmine, La'Terria and Jamilia, all 17, offer tips for the revolving characters in Baillie's spirited retelling of the Three Little Pigs / Little Red Riding Hood tales. At one point a phone operator enters the picture; they weigh in about what kind of phone the wolf should dial, what the ring tone should sound like.

"Have [the operator] smacking gum," Jasmine says. "She's ghetto."

Shepherd's got advice, too, as each does a run-through: Stay inside the square. Pivot, then talk. To Kenya-born senior Vera Njuguna, 17: Stop swaying or we'll have to strap your legs together.

Give me two years, she'd told Renton principal Kathryn Hutchinson after Hutchinson had talked her into starting the team, and I'll take somebody to nationals. She'd done it once before — as a coach for South View High in Hope Mills, N.C. — but it seemed an ambitious thought at the time.

Now she's beaten that goal by more than a year.

Her class reflects the school's population, equal parts African American, Asian, white and Latino. Some were kids starting to hang with the wrong crowd. Others already did, or had behavioral issues themselves. Those were the kids she went after.

Renton High boasts an exemplary arts program, and as students embraced debate's more theatrical events, she and assistant coach Jessica Barker, a first-year teacher, found literary works to match the speakers. Some, like Rihana, chose pieces that touched them personally; hers ends with the line, "If you had your dignity, you would not have taken mine."

"They've been through more than some adults have," Shepherd says. "You can't teach that hurt or anger. But you can coach it out. They can do pieces that other people can't, because of what they've been through."

Chilly welcome

Looking back, it was their first tournament, four months ago in Puyallup, that was hardest. The packed, bookish atmosphere was new to them, and they to it, and no one knew what to expect.

Some of it was small stuff, like chairs taken from their table. Other things struck deeper — a concessions worker refused to fill Baillie's water bottle minutes after filling a white teammate's. Then there were the names some said under their breath as Renton students walked past or huddled together.

"It wasn't something you could have misinterpreted," says Ebonie Moore, a gentle, baby-faced 17-year-old. "Especially with the words that were being said."

Rather than be distracted, the team took it as motivation. "Those people love their trophies," Manny says, reveling in the team's outcast status. "And if we're going to get back at them, it's not going to be through words or physical violence. We're going to take the things they love. We go in with our eyes on the prize."

Oh — the looks they got, when they said what school they were from. Ebonie recalls thinking about that as she went up to accept her trophy, one of two Renton won in its debut that day. "It was like, yeah, look who's getting the award and who's still sitting in their seat," she says.

As it turned out, the negative reactions were mostly an anomaly. But seized by the day's emotion, the team decided it was time to wear its pride on its sleeves. They designed bold team sweat shirts with a logo forged in their generation's lexicon. Renton DB8: Don't Hate.

The sweat shirts bear nicknames: Shepherd is Top Dawg. Jamilia is Songbird. Baillie is The Diva.

Manny is Mr. Anger Management. Slender, polite, he confesses to a short fuse. "When a lot of people treat you wrong, you get a lot of built-up hostility in you," he says.

Sensing that, Shepherd a few months ago prepared a dramatic set for him and senior Sharelle Johnson. The passages came from Alice Walker's "The Third Life of Grange Copeland," about an abused boy who grows up to echo his father's behavior before taking control of his life.

The emotion required to deliver Walker's words had to come from a deeper place. Manny had been there. "Not that I'm a violent person," he says, "but I know a thing or two about it." In competition, he prepares by confronting himself, alone in a hallway. "In a way," he says, "it really is anger management."

With Sharelle's help, he'd taken its dark edges and polished it into a shining jewel, one that vaulted the pair, along with a half-dozen other Renton students, into the final round of the national qualifying tournament.

Into the finals

Shepherd took 10 students, most of them African American, to Mukilteo, where they battled others from 18 regional powers for a trip to Philadelphia.

Eight of Renton's 10 reached the final rounds of their events — most dramatically, perhaps, in duo interpretation, where serious pieces are rare. The category, in which partners cannot touch or look at each other, typically rewards fast-paced humor, so Renton's duos stood out for their gravity. From the start, Shepherd knew they were taking a chance.

Up they went — slick nods to Monty Python, twists on Shakespeare, a hillbilly radio show. La'Terria and Jamilia did their piece on racism, tender but forceful.

In the sixth spot were Manny and Sharelle; Manny shed his glasses and suit jacket, providing the images to Sharelle's narrative. The swings of a toiling sharecropper became those of an abusive husband. The beatings grew worse as Sharelle's character increasingly challenged him, and were particularly vicious before the end, when Manny philosophized humbly to the audience as Sharelle, facing away, softly sang "Amazing Grace."

"Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be," he said, shaking and misty-eyed. "We all got our own souls, don't we?"

They finished with raised fists, then turned to touch hands in satisfied accomplishment.

If you weren't teary-eyed, you hadn't been listening.

In humorous interpretation, Baillie earned first alternate; in duo, La'Terria and Jamilia earned second alternate. Rihana was the national qualifier in dramatic interpretation: In tearful disbelief, she had to practically be pulled from her seat in Kamiak's crowded library, where the winners were announced.

When Manny and Sharelle heard they'd earned a Philadelphia berth, Manny could not contain himself: He erupted in a burst of primal screams, shock and swagger coming from somewhere deep. "I'm going to Philly, man!" he cried, to anyone who listened.

Says Hutchinson, later: "I got what I expected — a teacher who was gonna motivate them, students who created a community among themselves. We have kids on that team who don't speak up anywhere else. ... We have kids who have difficulty reading. Rebecca, as any good teacher does, removes the labels and says: I'll take you anywhere you want to go."

"The talent was right there, but it was never touched because they never had a team," says Leeah Brown, Baillie's mom. "Who knows what they could have done if they had put a team together before? ... You have to open that door and see what comes out."

For students like Manny, the experience has proved transforming. "If I'd never met the people who have come into my life, I probably would be screwing up in school," he says. "I feel blessed. It's one of the best things I've ever done."

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com