Just when you start to think everything is terrible, Chesterton state speech champion Carmen Thomas shows you otherwise with words that resonate

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com
Chesterton senior Carmen Thomas’ long road to a prestigious championship that ended with her holding a trophy on a stage at Fishers High School, site of the state speech tournament, began in a Chesterton classroom in early August.
Before a speech can be spoken, it must be written. That process started at Chesterton’s five-day speech camp, which was when the bar of expectations was set high and never lowered.
How high?
“The writing process took us probably three weeks total. I like to call it putting every word on trial for its life,” Thomas said. “We spent so many hours figuring out the exact wording of a line. It’s a really long process, but it was worth it in the end.”
Ten minutes’ worth of words spoken by Thomas not only survived but are immortalized in the form of the most coveted of all speech prizes, the state championship in the Original Oratory category.
No notes. Purely memorization.
“During postseason, I run it three times a day, so I know the speech like the back of my hand,” Thomas said.
The closer a student can come to hitting the 10-minute mark, the better. Thomas’ speech, delivered with an estimated 300 witnesses packed into a small space, lasted 9 minutes, 59 seconds.
As atypical as it is to come that close to perfect timing, count Dannielle Hunt, co-Director of Chesterton’s speech program with Aaron Drew, among those not surprised.
“Carmen over the past several weeks of our postseason, I’m willing to bet, put in more reps than any speaker in the state of Indiana so that she knew exactly what was going to happen once she got into that round, barring any unusual circumstances that may occur in a room where you have humans,” Hunt said. “But if left up to her, she knows that she can hit 9:59, and she knows that because she’s done it a thousand times before.”
To look at Thomas’ busy schedule is to wonder how she had the time to memorize a speech so well as to time it so precisely. The answer of course is that she didn’t have the time to do that, she made the time.
In addition to her classes, Thomas has a leadership role in the AP Mentoring club, participates in Quiz Bowl and AP Japanese Club, is president of the after-school Girls Rising club and followed her internship at the since-defunct Chesterton Tribune with one at this website, onwardtrojans.com.
On Sundays she rests, at least it qualifies as rest by her standards. She volunteers at a preschool.
“Snacks, games, you know, all the preschool things,” she said. “Honestly, that’s sometimes the highlight of my week. Sitting down and spending time with toddlers, seeing how much joy they have, is really refreshing.”
Thomas gained admission into the Purdue University Honors College with a scholarship and said she intends to study either economics or political science.
Hunt, a 1999 graduate of CHS and the speech program, has worked with Thomas for four years.
“Dannielle is amazing,” Thomas said. “We work really well together. This achievement is as much hers as it is mine.”
Thomas noted how helpful it was to brainstorm with Hunt and CHS Speech alumnae Anna Sanders and Mattea Sklut.
“We sat down during speech camp and wrote most of it,” Thomas said. “It’s the time of year when most people get their pieces together. People in interp events cut their pieces from books and start memorizing. It’s a week where we have a bunch of time to focus on Speech.”
Thomas’ speech “Everything is Terrible!” doesn’t sound as pessimistic a chord as the title suggests.
Hunt summarized Thomas’ message thusly: “The content of her speech was that when faced with overwhelming global distress we tend to react in one of two ways, either radically indifferent, meaning that we kind of step away from the news, we don’t engage, we even could fall into a neurological reaction called derealization, where it’s as if the world isn’t even real, or radical involvement, and there you have those examples where it’s a Kyle Rittenhouse, it’s a January 6th, where people became so radically involved as to kind of lose touch with what was appropriate, or OK, and that the answer to that is to look around, look to your right, look to your left, and meet any need that you see there, just right in your own little world. And when you do that, you see that maybe things are not so terrible after all.”
Thomas repeatedly performed “Everything is Terrible!” throughout the year, not just at competitions, but also when asking for feedback from friends, etc.
She expressed gratitude for Hunt working with her in a way that shored up a weakness.
“I have a hard time being emotionally vulnerable with audiences, which was something we were working on a lot this year because my speech at some points can be really heavy. But through coaching and coaching, I don’t know how to explain it,” Thomas said and then proceeded to prove that she knew how to explain it, “but I had to learn to open up to the people I was talking to because a lot of the times speech judges appear as this, like, entitity that you’re speaking to, but I needed to remember that that’s an actual person that I’m talking to and that helped a lot.”
Five people, to be exact.
“Those are the people I focus on because they’re the people judging me,” Thomas said. “I make sure to give an equal amount of attention to each judge.”
Hunt learned under Bob Kelly, not only the director of CHS Speech for decades, but who, according to Hunt, also was “setting the standard for the way Original Oratory was done from way back into the ‘70s.”
Kelly, Hunt said, placed great importance on the writing of the speech. She wanted to honor that “but at the same time allowing for the evolving of the introduction of social media into our culture and the way that we read now vs. the way we used to read, so we did a combination of short examples and a lot of them, but using the original structure.”
Hunt explained what she meant by the differences in reading, then and now.
“We’re all used to shorter content. We’re used to a much faster delivery system vs. where we used to go into a big, thick book in order to learn anything,” Hunt said. “So, I wanted to adjust to everybody’s ability to stay focused, but also call back, because there are a lot of people in the speech community that are from my era and earlier that I knew would appreciate Carmen’s structure as being classic, and that is what happened and that is what helped her to be the state champion.”
Hunt dug a little deeper into the evolution of the event and why she believes a nod to the past was well received.
“Nowadays – I’m sounding like a boomer here – but what we’re seeing in a lot of the final round and nationals and the trend of Oratory is that there is an effort to sort of break away from that classic oratory structure and also make it known that you’re doing that,” Hunt said. “So, they really like to break that fourth wall, and be like this is what we always do in speech but I’m going to do something totally different, and when everybody does that, it no longer becomes unique, right? I wanted to turn that trend upside down and say, I’m going to use the classic structure where we don’t casually use, ‘This is what we’ve always done,’ as an insult and show that we can use that classic structure, but also make it really current as well.”
Hunt’s goal, a lofty one akin to rolling an electric Model T off the assembly line in Detroit, was a difficult ask that she would not have entrusted to just anyone she didn’t think could meet the challenge.
“I needed a really special student in order to be able to achieve that and Carmen was that student,” Hunt said. “I guess I would say I am exacting, and I think the kids have fun with me, but also at the same time my expectations are high, and Carmen didn’t even blink and eye. She would ask for more: ‘OK, what else can I work on? What else can I do?’”
Thomas proved she also can perform as a radio broadcaster as well and finished third at state in Broadcasting, wrapping up that final shortly before heading to the Original Oratory final.
“It’s one of the most fun events I’ve ever done because you get to pretend to be a radio host and there are a lot of different things that we do,” she said. “We do news, cold reads, where they hand us a script and we have two minutes to prep, and then we get to read it with no stumbles or anything.”
They also are given a topic on which they must write and deliver an editorial after 30 minutes of prep time. The topic this time, Thomas said, was “the gig economy and whether or not that was a good thing.”
“It’s pretty intensive and there are a lot of different aspects of it,” Thomas said of the Broadcasting competition. “It’s just so much fun for me. I wasn’t expecting to make it to finals in that, but I was excited that I did.”
At districts, Thomas qualified for the Original Oratory nationals, June 16-20 in Desmoines.
“Final round was a really good run for me,” Thomas said. “It wasn’t the best speech I’ve ever given, but it was definitely up there. It’s a weird feeling because I won and so I know it was good, but part of me feels like I can do just a little bit better, which makes me excited because I still have nationals ahead of me.”