The Missouri State High School Activities Association (MSHSAA) honored Ben Stewart with the prestigious Mal Mayse Distinguished Service Award at the 2025 MSHSAA Speech & Debate Championships on Saturday, April 26.
Since 2004, Stewart has run the SpeechWire platform, a cloud-based service that helps manage speech, debate, congress, academic, moot court, mock trial and journalism competitions. As of 2025, SpeechWire is used to operate more than 2,000 events annually in the United States and around the world. These contests take place at the elementary, middle school, high school and college levels and include numerous state and national championship tournaments. Stewart has been working with MSHSAA since 2012.
“I've been grateful to work with Greg Stahl, Don Maurer, Marty Marsh, Jason West and every member of the MSHSAA staff I’ve had the opportunity to work with,” Stewart said. “I’m so glad Greg brought me in for a meeting—probably in 2011—to begin learning about the state tournament from Bill Jordan and Randy Pierce. They helped ensure, as much as possible, that the computer system would continue the traditions of the MSHSAA championships as we transitioned from index cards to the cloud.”
In addition to SpeechWire, Stewart operates TourneyWire, a platform used for cheer and dance tournaments in Illinois and Georgia, speech and acting contests in Iowa, and music solo and ensemble, organizational and gymnastics competitions in Illinois.
Stewart has been recognized with several honors for his service to student activities, including the Frank Sferra Director’s Commendation from the National Speech and Debate Association, the Distinguished Service Award from the Minnesota Speech Coaches Association, the Friend of Speech Award from the Ohio Speech and Debate Association, the L.E. Norton Award from the Bradley University Speech Team, the Service Award from the Tournament of Champions in Extemporaneous Speaking at Northwestern University, and the Mason Mentor Award from the George Mason University Speech Team.
“I’m so grateful to the many speech and debate coaches around the state of Missouri from whom I’ve learned about Missouri tournaments over the past 15 to 20 years,” Stewart said. “At first, it was absolutely a learning process—adapting to the unique aspects of how meets run in Missouri—but the coaches helped me understand how things needed to operate.”
He holds a Bachelor of Science in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.
Stewart’s interest in computerized activity administration began early. As a student at Wheaton North High School in Illinois, he created and ran the team website for three years. After a conversation with his head coach, Stan Austin, about the possibility of creating a platform to manage speech tournaments, Stewart wrote the first version of SpeechWire in 2004 — during his freshman year of college. It was first used at Wheaton North’s home tournament, and its success there quickly spread to other competitions.
While in high school, Stewart was deeply involved in student activities. He was the state champion in radio speaking, president of the student council, editor of the student newspaper, a lead in the school musical and a member of the state champion Scholar Bowl team.
Stewart said he feels honored to support coaches and students in activities around the world. He also expressed deep gratitude to his family — including his late mother, who taught him the importance of communication, patience and humor, his father, who introduced him to programming on a Commodore PET computer at age 5, and his aunt, Mary, who gave the family that very computer while working for Commodore.
“Without that gift, there would very likely be no SpeechWire,” Stewart said.