At the end of October, seventeen year old Woodford Senior Carolina Rhea made remarkable strides in the National FFA world, representing her state in the National Semifinals of Extemporaneous Public Speaking. In just under a year, Rhea has climbed from championing regional FFA competitions to earning a place on the national stage and ultimately walked away as a silver medialist.
Rhea didn’t grow up directly involved in agriculture, but her interest in the subject was sparked by her extended family’s careers. “My Dad’s side is heavily involved in agriculture back in Webster County, so I spent a lot of my summers running through soybean and corn fields. While my parents are a generation removed from production agriculture, my mom still maintained a garden while I was growing up, and we’ve now moved onto actual property with some acres of farmland. Being in those different environments and seeing the styles of agricultural engagement that can emerge has been really impactful, and is what motivated me to join FFA initially.” Rhea also shared some other influential figures who pushed her on her FFA journey. “Mr. Richardson and Erica Richardson were coaches and really helped me out with that. I’m not actively involved in Agricultural production, so I had lots of questions. A lot of what I learned about tariffs and the market was really from them.” Rhea has been a member of FFA since her sixth-grade year, when she was encouraged to join by the Woodford County Middle School Chapter and Ms. DeVito, and in eighth grade served as the Middle School Chapter President.
The National Extemporaneous Public Speaking event is sometimes nicknamed the “Ironman” of FFA competitions for the extreme challenge it poses. To even get there students will have had to win at least two other competitions at regional and state levels. The event itself is an ‘on the fly’ speech competition, where students are given a prompt about agriculture that they have never seen before and are then expected to give a speech about it with very limited time for preparation, and as the level of competition gets higher the difficulty of the questions continues to increase.
At the Kentucky level, students are given the potential prompts ahead of time, but at Nationals they go in blind, which requires much more preparation. “Breaking the habit of needing note cards was really important for me,” Rhea shared when asked about the challenges of preparing to take on the ‘Ironman’. Competitors were allowed to bring in research documents, but they required specific formatting, and most students spent weeks gathering their materials, but Rhea almost didn’t take anything. “Originally I was actually just going to depend on the ten minutes of internet time they provided us with, but about three days before the competition I decided I wanted to bring in resoruces and it was a mad scramble to try to get research and basic facts.”
After receiving her prompt, Rhea had only thirty minutes to prepare her speech. “I mean I was a nervous wreck the whole time I was competing, but I was really proud of making it that far. My whole chapter came to support me, the room was filled to the brim with people. That was my goal, and I honestly didn’t expect it would happen.” She delivered her speech clearly and concisely to the room of judges, all while being cheered on by her family and friends. “I think it taught me a lot about different areas of agriculture. We havent had anyone from Woodford compete in Extemp Nationals in a very long time so it was a big deal. I hope to compete at Nationals again, but we’ll just have to see.”
In regard to her own future, Rhea says she plans to major in agricultural education for college. “The agriculture teachers in my life have an incredible impact on their students- they’ve poured in time, effort, and tough conversations into our relationships, but every experience was focused on helping me develop. In every capacity I’ve worked in, engaging with students, especially younger ones, has been a highlight for me, so education is a path that I think would be very rewarding.”
