Burbank High School Wins First State Speech Championship

Burbank High School junior Gwyneth Glover won the California High School Speech Association’s State Championship in Dramatic Interpretation last weekend, becoming the first state champion in Burbank High School speech and debate history.

Glover, an 11th grader, competed April 17 through 19 at the 2026 CHSSA State Tournament held at James Logan High School in Union City. She performed “The Unremarkable Death of Marilyn Monroe,” a one-woman play by Elton Townend Jones, taking on the role of Marilyn Monroe without notes, costumes, or props, as the event rules require. She went five rounds and was scored by 17 judges drawn from across California, ultimately beating a field of 56 competitors. Every one of those 56 had already qualified out of hundreds of competitors across 11 leagues statewide. That’s not a small bracket.

The championship caps a three-year arc that Burbank residents should know about. As a 9th grader in 2024, Glover placed 9th in Dramatic Interpretation at the state level. In 2025, she came back and finished as runner-up. This year she won. Three consecutive state tournaments, three consecutive improvements, and now a title.

She also serves as president of the Burbank High School speech and debate team.

Volunteer coach Brandon Batham, who led the program to its first and second national championships in 2022 and 2023, said Glover’s win is the reason he came back to coach at his alma mater. “Gwyneth’s success is exactly why I do this,” Batham told reporters. “I came back to coach at my alma mater because I wanted Burbank students to have the same opportunities I had in high school. To see them do that, and succeed with those opportunities, is the most fulfilling reward I could ask for as a coach.”

Batham runs the program as a volunteer. That’s worth sitting with for a moment. National championships. A state title now. All built under a coach who doesn’t draw a salary for the work.

The program at Burbank High carries a nationally ranked standing, and the back-to-back national titles in 2022 and 2023 already put it among the elite programs in the country. The state championship, though, had never come. Hundreds of competitors from California’s high schools chase it every year. Glover’s win this spring fills that gap in the program’s record for the first time.

Coverage of Glover’s win notes that Dramatic Interpretation requires competitors to select and cut a published work, then perform it entirely from memory. No props. No costume. No notes. The performance carries everything. Choosing a one-woman play about Marilyn Monroe’s final hours and executing it well enough to beat 55 other state-qualified competitors over five rounds speaks to preparation that goes well beyond showing up ready on tournament day.

For Burbank residents curious about the broader competitive circuit, the National Speech and Debate Association oversees the national tournament Glover will now target. She’ll compete for a national championship at that tournament in June, where she’ll face top qualifiers from across the country. The CHSSA, the body that runs California’s state competition, posts qualification standards and results through the California High School Speech Association.

Glover’s path to June runs through a program that has already proven it can win at the national level. Batham coached the team to back-to-back national championships, so the infrastructure, the preparation, the competitive culture, all of it is established. What wasn’t there before April 19 was a state title. Now the program has one, carried home by a junior who started placing at state tournaments when she was a freshman.

If Glover wins in June, Burbank High will hold both a state and national championship simultaneously, something no previous version of the program has done. The national tournament runs in June, and Burbank residents who want to follow the team’s progress can find more information about the program at www.burbankdebate.com.

Batham, for his part, isn’t measuring success in trophies alone. He came back to Burbank High to give students the same platform that shaped him. Glover’s win, built incrementally over three years of state-level competition, is what that platform looks like when a student uses it fully.