As another year comes, so does another speech season. Speech has been a part of Cannon Falls for over seventy years, and is still going strong. “Cannon Falls has been freakishly successful,” says Holly Winget, one of the four speech coaches for seventeen years. Other coaches are Cal Vande Hoef, John Fogarty, and Ashley Howden. “An anomaly of small schools, we get quite a few people to go to state and a good percentage of them become medalists.” When asked about expectations of  this year, Coach Winget replied, “I never have expectations when we start out, but I always hope that we’ll do well. I hope that we will be disciplined and be extremely prepared and work really hard during the season, but I kind of feel that that takes care of itself. So I don’t have any expectations , but I know that if people do like past performances, they’ll do well.” But of course, no team of any kind can be prepared or disciplined without captains. “We try to be mentors in our categories,” explains Jordynn Zier, a newly made captain on the speech team. The other speech captains of 2015 are Matthew Breuer, Lily French, Matthew Moskal, Rianne Lund, Emma Thomley, Miranda Felton and Rachel Hartman.“We host our practices every week and we try hard to monitor and mentor people.” Like Winget, Jordynn had a very encouraging outlook on the year to come. “I think it’s going to be a very good year for CF. We have really good captains, really good coaches and really good people on the team.”

Some of these people are entirely new to the game itself. Of the 88 kids in Speech, 22 are starting their first speech season. One of these newcomers is 9th grader, Grace Yarbrough who joined the Creative Expression category of speech. “ My friends convinced me into speech and I’m having a lot of fun with it. It’s a different thing because I’ve never done anything like Speech before. I’m either going to do really good or really bad, but I’m definitely excited for the rest of the season.” In Speech, there are thirteen different categories, ranging from Humorous to Drama. Speech’s first meeting was November 30th, mostly a meeting for everyone to know how to start their season and get to know their team. It was a much easier time for the team than other meetings in the past, but not for our coaches and captains. They worked overtime to make sure Speech starts on the right path, because this year’s team is strong, and is going all the way to the top. Speech has its first tournament on January 23rd at Hill Murray. And after months of revising and working hard, a select few will hopefully make it to State on April 15 at Lakeville North.