All of the focus and follow-up on the highly anticipated Vice-Presidential Debate this past Thursday inspired a flood of memories about my time in the NFL. No, not the NFL that plays on Sunday Afternoons, Sunday Nights, Monday Nights, the occasional Thursday Night and all of the national holidays between Thanksgiving and Super Bowl Sunday.

The NFL I spent time in is the National Forensics League, the debating honor society of high schoolers from around the country. I didn’t have the athletic skills to make a sports team in my scholastic years–so it was the debate team where I did my competing.

I so wish that our current political candidates would spend some prep time with some of the amazing young men and women who compete in debate and speech competitions. There is nothing like being judged on whether or not you actually address a topic, answer a question with factual detail, or make eye contact with an audience. Those are the kind of skills that many NFL member schools teach and encourage their students to develop.

I mentioned to some friends that the only debate I remember losing as a competitive high school debater was one in which I made the dramatic (and ill advised) gambit of stating that I was not going to answer the question raised in my opponent’s rebuttal because I didn’t think it was relevant to our topic. In her critique after the debate, a judge pointed out that dismissing the question only made me look bad, because I might not be prepared to answer the question I hadn’t anticipated.

In researching the current strength of the National Forensic League, it seems that the society is doing well and there are hundreds of thousands of members who are carrying on one of our country’s oldest traditions of debating the issues of the day. Given the recent performances by adults in our national debates, they could learn a thing or two from those who are now called “SpeechGeeks” in that sometimes tough community known as high school.

Addendum: My high school attending daughter asked me if winking was allowed in competitive debating. That answer would be a no. There is no winking in any serious debate–or there shouldn’t be. Except if done by Tina Fey in a parody of a debate. And only because it gets great laughs.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/37730/saturday-night-live-vp-debate-open-palin–biden