Hoping to capitalize on his sixteen years of experience coaching high school speech, Mr. Dennis Brumirski, now in his second year of teaching at Mount Carmel, is starting a Caravan speech team for the 2014-15 competitive season.

Brumrski is a well known speech coach in the state of Illinois and has coached multiple state champions in Individual Events, which is what the IHSA formally calls speech team.  “Speech team is actually a misleading name for the activity,” says Brumirski.  “A more appropriate name would be competitive speaking and acting team, because the students compete in one or two of the fourteen events, and these events range from comedic acting with a partner, to persuasive speaking, to extemporaneous speaking.”

In the past sixteen years, Mr. Brumirski has sent many students to the state competitions from multiple schools such as Shepard, Richards, and Lemont.  He coached his first state champion in 1999 and his most recent in 2013 when a student from his team at Richards High School placed first in the state in humorous interpretation.

“The speech season happens in the cold dead of winter,” says Brumirski.  “Kids get up early on Saturdays and meet with students from as many as twenty five other schools at invitationals throughout the Chicago area and compete all day advancing through prelims, semi-finals and finals.  In the same vein as a sport, students competing in speech have an opportunity to advance through regionals and sectionals all the way to the state finals the third weekend in February at the Peoria Civic Center. It’s a grueling but incredibly rewarding experience.”

Brumirski believes, “Participating in speech is the single most important thing that young men can do to get ready for real life and for college.”  He describes the experience as “co-curricular in that the material and topics support what is being taught in the classroom, and the experience of competition will reward those boys at the school who may not participate or excel in sports, but have excellent acting, writing or debate skills.”