By Nina Culver For The Spokesman-Review

Instead of stressing out, Gonzaga Prep junior Bethany Cummings went into this year’s state debate competition not worrying about winning. She decided she was there to have fun and go with the flow – and she won first place in the oratory category at the WIAA high school state individual debate competition.

Her topic this year was stress, the thing that weighs us down, freaks us out and makes us frazzled. But it didn’t start out to be an award winning-speech. Cummings said she was angry one day and wanted to rant. She wanted to vent about having six hours of homework every night as she juggles three AP classes and faces everyone’s expectations to get a 4.0 GPA and “get into a good school.”

“I sat down one day and wrote it,” she said. “It was a ‘Why am I doing this’ moment.”

“What’s with all this pressure? If a gas is put under too much pressure it explodes. Are we just the gas waiting until something breaks, until our blood vessels pop, until our hearts take oxygen like a shot? What’s with all this pressure?”

Cummings has been on her school’s debate team since her freshman year. She has done both debate and speech competitions, but says she prefers speech.

“Speech is a lot more calm and persuasive,” she said. “I love speech because it’s a little bit empowering. It’s a good skill, and I like to talk.”

But the words she wrote down that day were different from a traditional persuasive speech. Many portions rhyme, and there’s a distinct cadence.

“She wrote the whole thing as a spoken word poem,” said English teacher Andre Cossette. “That was a risk.”

“Some say I’m frazzled, like Magic-School-Bus Ms. Frizzle sort of frazzled. And they’re right.

I am. I’m frightfully barely functioning, I’m so far past frizzle-frazzled I have begun to accept this state as normal, as OK. And that’s the most dangerous part about being under pressure. After a while, you may not even notice how close the bottle has gotten to exploding.”

Cossette was the debate coach until two years ago and still helps out, filling what he calls a “Master Yoda” role. He gave Cummings feedback on what she had written. She got advice from other teachers as well, even consulting the drama teacher about hand movements and facial expressions, Cossette said.

“She got help from everyone in the community,” he said. “It takes a whole village to raise a debate champ.”

Cummings said she got low scores from some judges at competitions through the school year who said her speech did not conform to the standard format. But she had taken her own speech to heart and decided to push forward and do what she wanted simply because it was fun. She also felt very strongly about what she had written.

“I changed my focus on why I wanted to do speech,” she said. “I feel like you have to feel the things you say, not just know them.”

Now that Cummings has had success with a poetic speech, other students may try to emulate it, Cossette said. “There’s nothing in the rules that says you can’t,” he said. “My hunch is other students will copy that.”

Cossette said Cummings does well in debate not because of her good grades and academic abilities, but because she’s willing to work hard.

“What really matters is the heart,” he said.

Cummings said she plans to compete on the debate team next year but doesn’t know what subject she will tackle.

“We’ll see when I get there,” she said. “I just have to get angry about something.”