Everyone gets that feeling at least once walking out of Friday assembly. That fatalistic sense of having to stand up in front of several hundred people and say something for five minutes. “Some people are very nervous to even do it at all,” speech coach Tom Fones said, “and for some people it’s like ‘Woah! I can hardly wait!’ It depends on who you are.” Every Friday, juniors, sophomores, and freshmen are reminded of “it”: Senior speeches.

The Senior Speech program began in 1985, and eventually became a graduation requirement for the entire class. “You really want to hear from the whole class…it’s a shared experience,” Fones said. Indeed, senior speeches have become an integrated part of the entire SPA community, quite different from the few student speeches that will be chosen for graduation, come June.

In the fall of 1996, Tom Fones began coaching the Senior Speech program. “Certainly in the early days, people began to start to take them more and more seriously. That has been true for several years now: where most people focus their attention on them,” Fones said.

Fones also noted that speeches have gotten more serious and less funny over the years. “Humor is very hard to do. [And] to do appropriately for the whole audience,” Fones said, “it’s hard to be funny for five minutes in a row on a theme—it really is.” These days, light-hearted speeches can be a diamond in the rough. “Humor, by its nature, is subversive. In general, it has to push boundaries, or else it’s not really funny. And so, you’re always thinking, as the adviser, does this one go too far? I would be lying if I said I made the right call every time. You just keep trying to readjust,” Fones said.

Fones recalled a pleasantly coincidental set of senior speeches. “One day, by chance, all four people, without talking to each other, wrote about religion. And they were a variety of religions, too: there was an atheist, a Christian, and a Jewish person, and a Hindu person—it was if we had planned it, but we didn’t,” Fones said.

Often, the fear of having to deliver a senior speech is rooted in the insecurity that one’s life is too uneventful to say anything meaningful. “One of the misconceptions is that you have to have something really dramatic to say or happen to you to have a really good speech,” Fones said. “Four or five years ago, we had somebody write about running over a frog with a power motor, and his [level of guilt] after he did that—it was a brilliant speech, it was a tremendous speech, but it was about an everyday thing like that.”

Fones’ last piece of advice was to write and practice several days in advance of the day the speech would be presented, “Basically, I want it locked in several days in advance…even a good speaker can’t really [ad lib a good speech]. You can’t just wing it.”