Making a statement
As speech comes to a close, speechies have much to celebrate after state.
State speech participants.
Happy speechies laid down their weapons of mass success for the 2018-19 season after a long hard winter of talking to walls. They now can spend their Fridays in more colorful clothes, start talking to people, rather than walls, and maybe, just maybe, get a little more Saturday shut-eye.
This year, the Cannon Falls speech team reels in a multitude of wins, including a total of seven state finalists, and many more state competitors. All in all, there were twenty state competitors, with seven bringing home shiny medals. This actually ties a record with amounts of state competitors, we haven’t had this many since 2016, which is huge! The team qualified for state in all thirteen categories and broke another record at sections with a whopping thirty section finalists. In an interview with Mr. Vandehoef, a speech coach and English teacher extraordinaire, when commenting on the seasons wins, he said that “I think we did pretty amazing for all of our challenges, and the fact we still had an amazing season and we all worked hard, even if we didn’t necessarily have practices. Overall, we were pretty much there for the end of the season. In all at state, 187 schools competed, and we were #2, and I think that’s something to be proud of.” Through the whole season, the team won eight tournaments in total, and placed second in three tournaments including state.
However, the end of the season is not always the happiest for the budding speechies because the team must say goodbye to their seniors. This years seniors include Grace Yarborough, Josie Ramler, Abby Barrett, Olivia Anderson, Roderick Reardon, Laura Johnson, Ben Gibson, Hannah Singewald, Nathan Van Zuilen, and Lily Price. Laura Johnson, Hannah Singewald, Josie Ramler, and Olivia Anderson also qualified to be on the Minnesota All-State team, which is a great honor in speech. However, even though the end of the season is a sad time, Grace Yarborough said that “It’s sad, but I’m looking forward to college, and I’ve had great experiences and made lifelong friends on this team.”
Hopefully in the future the speech team will enjoy many new additions to it’s roster, and perhaps another record break. In the meantime, speechies can enjoy their new, well earned freedom and cupcakes this Wednesday for the speech banquet.
Hey ya’ll! My name is Bianca Caputo, and I can often be found screaming at a ten year old iMac in an effort to not get fired. In the spare five seconds...