Photo courtesy of Nate Conoly
The Vestavia Hills High School speech and debate team won its fourth straight state championship in 2025.
Vestavia Hills High School’s speech and debate team this year captured its fourth straight state championship and seventh championship in nine years.
The Rebels took top honors among 20 teams competing for the 2025 state title, said Nate Conoly, who has coached the school’s speech and debate team for the past 11 years. Second place went to Montgomery Academy, while third place went to the Loveless Academic Magnet Program, also from Montgomery.
Vestavia Hills’ team had six students named as individual state champions, and two of those — Tina Gao and Veronica Zhang — had two first-place finishes this year.
The individual state champions were:
- Tina Gao, extemporaneous speaking and after-dinner speaking
- Veronica Zhang, international extemporaneous speaking and Congressional debate
- Ruogu Lei, dramatic interpretation speech
- Tina Lou, prose interpretation speech
- Mina Hu, Lincoln-Douglas debate
- Henry Jackson, big questions debate
For those unfamiliar with speech and debate competitions, at the state competition there are 12 types of speech events and three types of debate events, Conoly said.
In the speech events, students go through three rounds of preliminary competitions, and the top six students make it into the finals, where they are scored by a three-judge panel. In the debate events, students go through three preliminary rounds, and then the top eight competitors get seeded and play through a bracket competition, much like the NCAA basketball Elite Eight bracket. Those final eight then compete head to head until a winner comes out on top.
Points are given for top finishers in each event to determine which team is the state champion.
