National Points Race

Here, you can find the standings for the 2020-2021 National Points Race, which began with the University of Kentucky Speech and Debate Season Opener on September 12, 2020 and conclude with the NSDA National Tournament on June 18, 2021. Standings will be updated at the end of every month, featuring the tournament news of the month.

While we acknowledge that plenty of extraordinarily talented extempers may not travel frequently, the National Points Race seeks to identify the “best” extemper across a series of widely-recognized tournaments in the United States. Our scoring system heavily values consistency and attendance at major circuit events.

You can find information on the methodology behind the National Points Race here. As this is the first time the Extemper’s Bible is maintaining a competition of this scale, we are open to feedback on ways we can improve our scoring, including the addition or removal of tournaments and/or changes in point values across tiers. Feel free to send us suggestions at steve@extempers.org and james@extempers.org; however, no changes will be made during the 2020-21 season once competition begins.

Unfortunately, for the inaugural season of the National Points Race, there will be no prize given to the winners (other than recognition from your fellow competitors!).

Looking for our past updates? Check out these links:

September Update

October Update

November Update

December Update

January Update

February Update

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Current Standings:

After a busy slate of tournaments in January and February, the dust has begun to settle, and the contenders for the National Points Race’s top spots are very clear. In a dominant first place is Katherine Rollins (Potomac, VA), who won the Cavalier Invitational, the Cavalier Challenge, and the MBA (!) while finalling at Harvard just in 2021 alone to establish herself as the favorite for the title. She has only a few real challengers, the greatest being Katelyn Cai (BASIS Scottsdale, AZ), whose championship at James Logan and strong final round performances at Barkley and Harvard leave her just 325 points behind Rollins. Mukta Dharmapurikar (Durham, NC) slips in behind her with a win at Sunvite, 2nd at Barkley and a 3rd place trophy at Harvard. Pranav Pattathunaduvil (Plano West, TX) followed up a strong November/December with a second-place finish at the MBA, but his relative absence from January’s smaller tournaments means he now falls to 4th. With so few tournaments left, these competitors are the most likely contenders for the crown by a large margin.

Although he remains 700 points behind Pattathunaduvil, Peter Alisky (Smoky Hill, CO) shows that he remains a force to be reckoned with, with points earned from the Cavalier Invitational, Cavalier Challenge, and the MBA. Just behind him is Kush Narang (Bellarmine College Prep, CA) who makes a significant leap to 6th place overall with 3rd place finishes both at the MBA and at the Cal Invitational.

Three competitors are currently tied for seventh; Krishna Sanaka (Hawken, OH) took a slight dip from his fourth-place standing in December despite his 6th place finishes at MBA and Barkley. Yale champion McKinley Paltzik (Phoenix Country Day, AZ) benefited from a strong 4th place showing at MBA, but Ananth Veluvali (Edina, MN) made up ground with a 5th place finish at Harvard to match both her and Sanaka.

The story of the month, however, is Daniel Kind (Lake Highland Prep, FL), who shot up from 23rd on the last National Points Race ranking to crack the Top 10 in February. Kind benefited from a 2nd place finish at Sunvite, as well as back-to-back championships at Barkley and Harvard. He remains the only non-MBA invite in the NPR’s Top 10; had he been invited, he would sit at no lower than 5th in the current standings. His victory keeps MBA 5th-place finisher Charles Hou (Plano West, TX) out of the Top 10 again.

Behind Hou are Ethan Jiang (Seven Lakes, TX), Ashok Ramkumar (Bellarmine College Prep, CA) and Gabriel Frank-McPheter (Gabrielino, CA) in 12th, 13th, and 14th respectively. They each earned 700 points for their MBA performances but had relatively quiet months otherwise. Frank-McPheter now must share his 14th-place title with Michelle Jin (Harker, CA), who made a strong debut on the Top 25 by finalling at Barkley and Stanford and championing the Cal Invitational.

Other notable movements inside the rest of the Top 25 include strong upwards movements from Michelle Liu (Ardrey Kell, NC) after a slew of strong final round appearances, the entrance of Kyle Letterer (Jasper, TX) with a Stanford victory and Harvard semifinal appearance, the entrance of 2020 USX finalist Vikash Giritharan (Eastview, MN) with points-earning performances at the MBA and Harvard, and lastly, the entrance of Owen Thompson (Bellarmine College Prep, CA) after placing 2nd at James Logan and the Cal Invitational.

Finally, we want to acknowledge some standout performances that simply were not enough to make the Top 25 due to the sheer quantity of competition: Alli Herring (Eastview, MN), who won Marshall and placed 6th at Harvard, Antonina Clementi (Teurlings Catholic, LA), who placed 3rd at Sunvite, Luccia Yacoub (Gabrielino, CA) and Josh Morganstein (Miramonte, CA), who both championed Stanford, and William Chien (Harker, CA) and Majid Shabbeer (Bellarmine College Prep, CA) who both placed 2nd at Stanford,

Here are the current Top 25 competitors for the 2020-21 season (last updated after Harvard and Cal):