Still Champions

The top two teams at the Massachusetts Speech and Debate League championship were no surprise—Catholic Memorial and Shrewsbury High School. However, as the results were announced inside the Ronald S. Perry Gymnasium on April 13, the look of fear on the faces of the CM team described the intense pressure. With strong performances from Shrewsbury, it was a realistic possibility that they could overcome CM’s 32 final round qualifiers and break the school’s stranglehold on the title.

 

Thankfully, it didn’t.

 

With a final score of 271 points to Shrewsbury’s 264, Catholic Memorial was declared the 2026 MSDL Speech and Congressional Debate champions in a competition that coach Br. Anthony Cavet compared to a high-scoring basketball game. CM has now won eight championships in a row and nine in 10 seasons.

 

“How does it happen? We have transformational leadership from nine senior captains who let the team know what the culture is, and they pass it on to them,” said Br. Cavet. “When we were practicing, I said that these kids were good, and I didn’t want to be the one judging them because there wasn’t a paper’s worth of difference between them.”

 

With over 70 entries at the competition and 32 in the final round, the team heavily relied on their senior leadership to run practice and instill the expectations that has led to championship after championship.

 

“There are a lot of responsibilities for our senior captains. They have to run practices and they are expected to perform themselves. They need to care for their brothers and be a strong public speaker,” said assistant coach Ryan Julian ’18. “Senior captains perform multiple events and work long hours. We need them in other words to serve the entire team.”

 

In Play Reading, the team nearly swept the category and took six of the seven finalist spots. Arias Llopiz ‘28, who had previously found success in Duo with Andrew DeSimone ‘28, finished in first place. Called the workhorse of the team by Julian, Llopiz scored the most points for CM, placing second in Duo with Andrew DeSimone ’28 and third in declamation.

 

“We had many people who decided that Play Reading was going to be their thing, and that gave us some of the most abled people in the category. It was the closest we’ve ever come to closing out a category,” said Cavet.

 

Like Llopiz, Prose was won by someone who had specialized in Duo but produced an individual championship performance when it mattered. Jude Kaleba ‘27 won the category, with John Tobin ‘27 and Josh Rivera ‘29 finishing second and fifth.

 

Kaleba’s took his piece 700 Sundays by Billy Crystal, a memoir about the comedian’s time with his father, who died when he was 15 years old. Impersonating the comedian, he told the tale of an ecstatic nine-year-old Crystal hearing news of his father bringing home a new car, only for it to be a dumpy Plymouth Belvedere that was eventually struck by a local mobster.

 

Thomas Tessier ‘27 pulled off a huge, championship-clinching victory in Radio, making him the third CM student to win the category in four years. Past champions include Jed Murphy ’26 in 2025 and Samuel Cahill Farella ’23 in 2023.

 

The Tessier win was not only an upset, but the result of daily progress and preparation.

 

“Everyone loves Tessier to death because he’s a sweetheart, and even seniors like Jed Murphy, who was the returning champion, was probably happy that Thomas won it if he had not won again,” said Br. Cavet. “He’s someone who came every day to practice, took his radio copy, sat in the back, and practiced his piece.”

 

Following another win in their historic run, the team shows no signs of slowing down. With Julian set to succeed Cavet as the head coach in the fall, the goal is to not only keep winning championship, but to instill confidence in CM boys.

 

“We got to keep winning and keep training boys to be great public speakers. In the past 10 years we’ve had 43 state champions and hundreds of kids who have this self-advocacy and believe that they are a public speaker,” said Julian. “We’re going to keep giving kids the confidence that they can speak in any given situation.”

 

Selected team members will next compete at the National Catholic Forensics League Grand National Tournament in Washington, D.C., on May 23–24, followed by the National Speech and Debate Tournament in Richmond, Virginia, from June 14–19.