COMMUNITY
Looking From the Outside In: A Practical Guide to Inclusive Tournaments Part Two in a Three-Part Rostrum Series on Promoting Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities in the Speech and Debate Community
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s a coach and more broadly a person with disabilities that are not immediately visible, I often grapple with a type of imposter syndrome that causes me to second guess myself as a valid voice when speaking up on issues of ableism and accessibility. In my moments of self-critical doubt, I feel like I shouldn’t speak up because my disabilities “only” amount to fatigue and pain disorders, or because I’m just not “disabled enough,” not “struggling enough” to justify accommodation requests, or not “suffering enough” from the effects of ableism to critically address it as someone whom it directly affects. Fortunately, those moments pass, and my lived experiences within and beyond our activity consistently remind me that my perspective as a person with disabilities is both valid and important. The specific experiences people with disabilities have within the speech and debate world should inform the ways we approach ableism and accessibility in our activity. Those with disabilities in our activity can most clearly point out and bring attention to the deleterious effects of exclusion and isolation
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that come from ableism. Therefore, it is important that these experiences are seen and heard and that our community takes active steps to make those who are not personally affected by issues of ableism understand the wounds and damages inflicted by negative experiences. Though my personal experiences are numerous, two examples in particular highlight how unintentional actions and a lack of clarity led to me feeling isolated or excluded. Early in my coaching career, as a first-time attendee at the Tournament of Champions (TOC), I vastly underestimated how taxing the weekend of traversing the University of Kentucky campus would be. This negative experience was by no means the fault of the tournament, but I was struggling with meeting the duties of my obligations as a coach and a judge within the first few hours of the tournament due to the extensive travel required to access my assigned rounds and those of my students. Within two rounds, I was simply
ROSTRUM | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020
by Victoria Freeman with Jan Pizzo
overcome with exhaustion and pain, which caused me to not only be terrified that I simply would not be able to physically get to my assigned rounds, but also that if I were to be able to make it in time, I would be so physically drained that my mental capabilities would suffer as a direct result. Panic set in, because I had no idea what to do or how to go about advocating for myself without wounding the tournament or suffering losses in terms of my professional reputation. Several years later, I was approached by a summer camp after my students made a deep run at the TOC. After a number of enthusiastic conversations regarding the opportunity of working at the camp, I asked about the potential of reasonable accommodations. What had previously been an open and responsive line of communication went silent.
It was only after several weeks and follow up messages from those whose standing in our community made them impossible to ignore was I finally told the following: “In terms of accommodations, there’s not much we can do. . . there are some accommodations that are certainly possible—but I don’t want to oversell them, because the structure of camp is constant, and I worry that the accommodations I talk about might only help marginally on the edges.” I know that while my specific experiences are not universal, they’re also not entirely unique. Many people with disabilities have been made to feel that they don’t belong within the speech and debate community through largely unintentional oversights. It is my hope that by widely adopting the recommendations below from the Persons with Disabilities
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www.speechanddebate.org/ international-day-of-personswith-disabilities