The University’s forensics team, also known as the speech and debate team, has not competed in over two years after former team coach Kelly Larson stepped down to take on the role of head of the communications department.  

“Probably at this time we will no longer continue the forensics and part of that reason is the demand on someone to be a coach for that team is pretty significant,” Dr. Richard Miller, dean of arts and sciences, said.  The teaching demands on Larson and the difficulty in finding a replacement coach who has the skills and fulfills the needs in the classroom is difficult, Miller said.

“To try to revitalize it from basically scratch would be very difficult,” Miller said. He said that the forensics team did win a national championship in the ‘90s and does not want to downplay the program’s success. He added that the last year Missouri Southern had the forensics team, it competed without a coach.

“It’s not very professional and not fair to the students where if they need to talk to the coach, they have to call him,” Miller said.

According to Miller, with the absence of the forensics team, students have started moving toward the mock trial team.

“It’s a different kind of forensics and this is its third year and they are in the first round of nationals this year,” Miller said.  

Miller explained that the mock trial team operates at a fraction of the cost the forensics team did, citing travel expense as one of the main reason for the higher cost with the forensics team. Miller said that since many institutions are cutting their forensics team, the Southern team had to travel further to find schools to compete against, whereas the mock trial has managed to compete almost solely in Missouri.

“I will say Mr. Larson did a phenomenal job as our forensics coach, especially given the fact that it was not funded at the level that a lot of schools are funded,” Miller said.

“I don’t think they know what they are going to do yet,” Larson said. Larson expects the final decision to be made via the University’s program prioritization initiative. Currently, no official decision has been made concerning the future of the forensics team.