Sophomore Brandon Carp will be traveling to Louisville, Kentucky today to compete on a national level in the 88th Future Farmers of America’s annual convention.

Every year Future Farmers of America (FFA) does a variety of career development events for selected students to compete in.

This year, Carp is competing in the public speaking event.

“I’ll be going into creed speaking, specifically,” Carp said. “I feel pretty confident about it.”

The five paragraph creed must be memorized word for word, analyzed and fully understood so that the competitors can successfully answer a series of three random questions asked by a panel of three to five judges.

Carp will be competing against 47 other high school students. The winner from tomorrow will move on to the semi-finals that are held on Thursday and then finally the finals that are on Friday.

If Carp makes it to Friday’s final event, he could be speaking in front of as many as 20,000 people.

This is Carp’s first time competing on a national level.

“Last year I did some of the district and state level competitions,” Carp said. “I did dairy cattle judging, agricultural sales and agricultural communications.”

Carp won at the state level for creed speaking, allowing him to advance to nationals.

He explained that a lot of time and dedication went into preparing for this competition.

“The first part was just trying to memorize the creed, then after that I just worked on polishing it, he said. “I had a lot of practice with answering a variety of questions, and I had a lot of FFA teachers give me tips and help me to prepare.”

If he makes it to finals, he will find out what he places that evening. The winner is to receive $1,000.