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Schools

No Debate About It

Award-winning Buffalo Grove High School coach helps students shine.

Awards are nice. So are first-place finishes at tournaments. But that’s not what it’s all about for Tracey Repa, who coaches ’s debate, acting and speech teams.

“I seldom go over who won at a tournament, beyond sending out the results each week,” she said. “When a tournament is over, we are up and practicing, setting goals for next week."

“Awards are not the focus — in this activity, there are more small success then major awards.”

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Paradoxically, Repa’s philosophy and the success it has brought to Buffalo Grove High School’s forensics team is probably a key factor why the National Forensic League has given her a second Diamond Award, emblematic of coaching excellence nationwide. She is one of three in Illinois to receive the award and 17 in the U.S.

If success can be measured in numbers, then these numbers from Buffalo Grove speak for themselves:

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  • 14 state competitors since 2000-01
  • 14 district qualifiers for National Catholic League since 2008-09
  • 18 district qualifiers for Nationals since 2002
  • 165 separate awards this season, with five more tournaments to go

Not bad, considering the team had six students when Repa joined as an assistant coach and this year has 36, down from a last year’s 60.

“That was more than we could manage,” she said. “We had a big group graduate. This year we were a bit more selective in auditions.”

Kate Hutchinson, fine and performing arts coordinator at Buffalo Grove High School, said Repa “basically lives and breaths Speech year-around.”

The two have been close friends since their childhood in Elk Grove Village.

“Our friendship began on the stage of Grove Junior High in a production of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’" Hutchinson said. “It solidified in high school on the speech team, where we both competed in nearly every event over four years.”

It was Hutchinson who brought Repa to Buffalo Grove as an assistant coach.

“I wanted to see the program grow and asked if we could bring on an assistant coach,” she said.

Repa, who attended Columbia College in the city, acted in several small city theater productions, and wrote and produced several radio plans, had just had her son and was ready to return to work.

The assistant coach’s job seemed like a good fit.

“It was the best decision I had ever made,” Repa said.

Today, Repa works with 10 assistant coaches, three of them volunteers. And although she spends much time networking with other coaches statewide to ensure forensics remains strong and doing paperwork for the BG team, much of her time is spent working with assistant coaches and individual team members.

“I look at my job as a puzzle that I constantly look at to determine what I need to shift and adjust in order to make things work correctly,” she said.

She loves guiding teens and watching them grow from tentative and unsure newcomers to polished performers, a difficult journey for some.

“When you do something outside of your comfort zone, you are performing for the right reason,” Repa said. “As soon as we get them to perform to connect with an audience, they win all the time, but kids don’t understand that.”

She recognizes that forensics is a vehicle for students to ride to learning leadership, becoming proficient in goal setting and learning that there are no limits to what they can accomplish.

"I want them to learn that you don’t know what you can accomplish until you open yourself up to the possibilities,” she said.

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