“Tell Me Another Story”: Remembering Jim Menchinger, 1940–2026

Michigan Speech Coaches, Inc. has lost one of its founders.

Jim Menchinger, “Mench” to the thousands of students and coaches who knew him, died on October 17, 2026, at 86. He spent more than four decades at Portage Northern High School, and it’s hard to find a corner of Michigan speech he didn’t help build. But before any of that, he helped build this organization.

Where MSCI began

In the fall of 1967, a group of Michigan teachers met to ask how an organization of their own might serve students across the state. Jim was 27 and two years into teaching at the brand-new Portage Northern. He was one of the founders in that room.

We still use his line about how it all started: “like most debates, it began with argumentation.” The argument became an association, the association became Michigan Speech Coaches, Inc., and Jim stayed in the room for nearly sixty years.

In 1979 MSCI created its Hall of Fame to honor the coaches who had shaped speech education in Michigan. Jim was in the first class. In 2008 the board chose him as Guest of Honor at the Spring Conference on Mackinac Island, a way of thanking him at the place he had helped turn into a homecoming for Michigan coaches. Through every one of those springs he did what MSCI exists to do: he made other coaches better.

A coach for every coach

Plenty of coaches build one great program. Jim also built the coaches around it.

• His own former students. Brian Snell, a member of Portage Northern’s 1981 state championship team, came back to coach beside him. Ashley Bowen led the Portage Northern program for three years with Mench coaching at her side. “He taught me to write, to lead, to communicate, and to fight (like hell) when needed,” she wrote this week. When she was honored by MSCI, he wrote her a letter. It was the last one he sent her.
• Coaches from other schools. Don Goodling competed against Portage Northern, and still remembers that Mench “always gave great notes on my forensic speeches even though I was on the other team.”
• Coaches who weren’t coaches yet. After retiring from the classroom in 2001, Jim spent eleven years training Western Michigan University’s student teachers. He wrote for the national Rostrum magazine and wrote a book on how to start and run a forensics program.
• The whole state. He chaired the national league’s Michigan district for ten years and is credited with rebuilding it. Both MIFA and the National Federation named him Coach of the Year. In 2011 the National Speech & Debate Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame.

Ask Michigan coaches of a certain age who taught them how to do this job, and many will say Mench.

What he believed

His Hall of Fame citation sets out four principles. They read like MSCI’s mission in his own words:

Communication is the foundation of life; both the cause of problems and the creator of solutions. Forensic participation will absolutely change a person’s life. Every person deserves the chance to be a member of a speech team. Awards are nice, but being a great communicator for life is the greatest reward.

He meant all four, and the third one most of all.

• Tammy Hibner came to Portage Northern from a school with 40 in her graduating class, “terrified.” He brought her from his English class into forensics, “where I made my closest high school friends.”
• Amy Brandt’s parents signed her up because she was so shy. She says she was “horrible,” and that it gave her “a great seat to watch him guide my amazing classmates with his skill and kindness.”
• Bob McCrorey insists there was no one worse at forensics than he was. “But [Mench] really pushed me to overcome a lot.”

Building Northern

Jim was born September 5, 1940, in St. Joseph. The family liked to say his birth announcement showed a baby in front of a microphone. At St. Joseph High School he was an honor Thespian, and he met a classmate named Donna, who would be his wife for the rest of her life.

He graduated from Western Michigan University in 1962, taught at Richland and Gull Lake, then went to Portage High School. In 1965 he moved to the newly opened Portage Northern, where he taught until 2001. There he built forensics and debate from nothing. He also taught English and broadcasting and ran the school’s in-house station, WNHS.

His students worked hard because he did. “You would never imagine the insane hours that man put into afterschool time, nights and weekends,” wrote Debra Beard Bader, Class of 1976. “During the season he drove us weirdos to competitions all over Michigan.” On the way home from debate, Marcia Ann Jowers (Class of 1967) remembers, “he always had the team stop at a ‘Big Boy’ so I could get strawberry pie.”

The results were remarkable:

• Team titles: Portage Northern won MIFA State Finals team championships in Class B in 1977 and 1981, and in Class A in 1985 and 1989.
• Consistency: from 1984 to 2001 the team never finished below fourth, and it was runner-up twelve times.
• Individual titles: his students won 40 of them in those years.
• Nationals: seventy of his students qualified.

Jim had a gift for spotting talent before anyone else did. Brian Snell had never heard of forensics when Mench told him he’d make a good extemp speaker. Scotty Melvin, now a radio host, says Jim “was the first person to tell me I may have a talent of some sort.” And in 1980 he paired Jim Frego with a student named Susan Allen in a performance piece. “Mench made a good cast when he put us in the same multiple!” Susan wrote. They married forty years later, and Mench gave the toast.

He also coached with standards. He called Frego “James” when he was teaching and “Frego” when he was disappointed. Once he caught Frego cramming a speech at the last minute and told him: “If you EVER truly applied yourself, there is no limit to what you could accomplish.”

The Mench

Jim kept coaching long after he left the classroom. In 2011, Western Michigan University gave him its Golden Apple in his fiftieth year of coaching at Portage Northern. Students still found him in the coaching room in 2016.

The tournament he founded is still running, as the Menchinger Invitational. Michigan coaches call it “The Mench.” It ran for the 48th time this spring, and its traveling trophy carries his name.

Several of his students have pointed out that “Mench” sounds like mensch, the Yiddish word for a good and decent person. Anyone who sat across from him at Mackinac knows how well it fit.

Tell me another story

In 2000 Jim wrote an essay for Rostrum about storytelling. It opened with his own young children asking, “Tell me a story,” and closed with an audience asking for one more.

Michigan speech coaches will be telling stories about Mench for a long time: the Big Boy stops, the matchmaking, the “Frego,” the letters he wrote to coaches who had once been his students. “It’s impossible to overstate his positive influence on generations who needed his help to find their voices,” wrote Steve Chung, one of his state champions. Every one of us who coaches in Michigan has benefited from what he started in 1967.

In Jim’s honor, and with the wishes of his family, MSCI has donated to plant a grove of three trees in an area in great need of reforestation. It is a small gesture beside his extraordinary impact as an educator. We hope it grows as strong and deep as the impression he left on all of us.

Jim was preceded in death by his wife, Donna, in 2025. He is survived by his sons Derek, Brent and Jeff, his brother Roger, and a large extended family. The family asks that memorial gifts go to the Portage Northern Forensics and Debate team.

Services

• Visitation: Wednesday, October 28, 4–7 p.m., Langeland Funeral Home, 3926 S. 9th St., Kalamazoo.
• Thursday, October 29: visitation at noon and the memorial service at 1 p.m., at the same address.
• Entombment: Friday, October 30, 1 p.m., North Shore Memory Gardens, Coloma.
• Details and the service livestream are on the funeral home’s page.

— The MSCI Board of Directors: Tyler Baas-Peterson, Heather McKaig, Amy Janz, Charlie Rinehart, Ruth Kay, Elizabeth Campbell, John Rutherford and Jeff Butts