Jason DeRusha is always busy, it seems. His alarm goes off at 2:45 on weekday mornings in his Maple Grove home so he can arrive at WCCO TV in downtown Minneapolis in time to anchor morning shows from 4:30 to 7 a.m. and 9 to 10 a.m. He’s frequently heard on WCCO radio and is the food critic for Minnesota Monthly magazine.
He is past president of
the Board of Governors of the Upper Midwest Chapter of the National Academy of
Television Arts & Sciences. He’s a frequent speaker and host for charity
fundraisers. He has earned nine Emmy Awards for his television work.
He’s also a dad. And,
proving that life comes with twists and turns, he’s the first-year coach of the debate and speech teams at Maple Grove High School.
Jason and his wife Alyssa
have two sons; Seth is a junior at Maple Grove and Sam is in ninth grade. Both
boys participate in debate and speech, but the teams were left without a coach as
the current school year approached. The previous coach had stepped down and
time was running short before the debate season began last fall.
Jason sent an email to the school and
asked how he could help.
“Those were famous last words for any
parent,” he said with a laugh. “The next thing I knew, I was doing a Zoom
interview and getting a background check as an employee of the school district.
“This really was about trying to do the
right thing as a dad. With my job in TV, I’ve sort of never been able to coach
my kids’ soccer teams or teach their church school or any of that stuff.”
He jokes about debate practice in the
fall and speech practice in the winter conflicting with his afternoon nap, but
he’s all-in.
“He’s very energetic and involved, which is really great for the team,” said senior debate and speech participant Mira Cook during a speech tournament at Wayzata High School on Saturday. “He is very involved in everything that goes into it; not only the coaching aspect, but the kids themselves, which is really nice. He’s very invested.”
DeRusha took part in high school speech while growing up in suburban Chicago. He was a three-time state finalist in a category called Radio Speaking, in which
students are given a stack of news stories that they shape into a timed radio
segment. His high school had its own radio station, which became his home away
from home and helped him get started on a broadcasting career. After graduating
from Marquette University in Milwaukee, he worked at TV stations in Davenport,
Iowa, Rockford, Illinois, and Milwaukee before joining WCCO in 2003.
One sticking
point in his new coaching position was that he knew nothing about debate. That
didn’t dissuade him from taking that job, which became more about
administrative duties than coaching.
“To be
completely honest, he was there to manage us,” said Seth DeRusha. “He didn't
really do anything debate-related. He got us signed up, he got us judges, and
he made sure we were going to be there, which is what he could do.”
Jason said,
“The respect I have for the people who have done this for years and
years, they’ve been really generous. I didn’t know anything about debate. The
kids had to teach me everything. Next year I’ll be ready to go. It took a full
season to get my arms around it.
“I just thought, ‘I speak for a living, I
might have some things to offer these kids.’ But debate is barely about public
speaking. It’s about research and preparation. Debate topics included Bitcoin,
NATO and the Baltic states, whether the unlimited right to strike is just or
not. These kids are tackling important issues. The beauty of debate is it
forces kids, based on a coin flip, to argue one side or the other of these
issues. If you required everyone in our country to argue both sides of an
argument, we’d be in a better place.”
DeRusha knew
how vital these activities were to his own children, as well as many of their
friends.
“Debate and speech are so important for
kids who maybe aren’t as athletic or don’t have other interests. This becomes
the hub of their friend group, and all of Seth’s friends are from debate,” he
said. “I didn’t want those kids to not have this experience. You’d never have a
soccer or tennis or football team go a season without a coach, and it was a
realistic possibility that these teams wouldn’t have a coach. I was not going
to let that happen.”
Speech tournaments are a Saturday
mainstay, starting early in the morning and filling up much of the day. For
Saturday’s event at Wayzata, the Maple Grove team was on a school bus before
the sun had fully risen and they weren’t home until dusk was settling in.
The Crimson speech team gathered in the
Wayzata cafeteria between rounds. DeRusha checked on kids as they came in from
performing, several of them competing in speech for the first time. His initial
question to each of them was, “How’d it go?”
The kids gave their assessments, dug into
the lunches and snacks they brought along, and hashed over the early rounds of
the competition as they awaited word on who advanced to the final rounds.
“He gives us
feedback on speeches, which is really good to hear, especially from someone who
has kind of used speech in their life,” Mira said.
To the
general public, Jason is the most recognizable debate and speech coach in Minnesota. Even
at Maple Grove High School, his role has raised questions along the lines of,
“Is that the guy on TV?”
“Occasionally,
we actually do hear that,” Mira said. “It's mostly from people within our own
school, who are kind of like ‘Oh my God, you guys have a celebrity as your
coach.’ ”
Seth DeRusha
said he sometimes refers to his dad as Coach “to make fun of him.”
“All my
friends are obsessed with him in a jokey way,” Seth said. “They take pictures
of him when he’s walking into the school. It's like a joke. At the last
tournament, one of the people who was working at the tournament recognized my
last name and asked me about it. So it's funny like that.”
As much as DeRusha has done
to make sure the students are able to participate in the activities they love,
it’s a two-way street. In early December, for example, he posted this message and a team photo on his
Twitter account, @DeRushaJ:
“So proud of these
absolute legends: the Maple Grove Senior High debate team just won the Northern
Lights National Qualifiers tournament and all of these young people earned the
right to compete at the National Speech and Debate Tournament in Louisville
this summer. But they also showed me how loving and caring they are as humans,
as they faced some tough decisions in the final phase of the tournament. It has
been my absolute honor to coach them along the way - as usual I’ve learned more
from them than they learned from me. Our future is in good hands with all of
these scholars.”
“These moments with these kids have been
an incredible gift,” he said. “The kids are amazing.”
--MSHSL media specialist John Millea has been the leading voice of
Minnesota high school activities for decades. Follow him on Twitter @MSHSLjohn
and listen to "Preps Today with John Millea” wherever you get podcasts.
Contact John at jmillea@mshsl.org
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