Last Friday, Feb. 2, 15 students were not at school but instead were at Skutt Catholic High School. As part of the school’s speech team, the group, consisting of three freshmen, seven sophomores and five juniors competed in their third competition of the season.
The SkyHawk Speech High School Invitational was one of the biggest competitions of the season as it had over 24 teams there competing. The Griffins competed in eight different categories and came home with two awards.
Andrew Jones earned 5th for Humorous Interpretation and Andrew Jones, Colton Knott, Addie Horst, Claire Hayworth and Jada Randecker earned 2nd for their Oral Interpretation of Drama competition.
“I’m really proud of OID (Oral Interpretation of Drama) and everyone in that we’ve been working really hard with it,” speech team member, junior Andrew Jones said. “We’ve had a strong start to fit. It’s gonna be a tough, challenging season. There’s a lot of great competition, but I think we can show who we are.”
Despite the school’s current student body size, the team is classified as a Class A team even though most of the school’s competitive teams are considered Class B.
“I feel good about it its a lot of really good competition, which makes us better,” speech team sponsor Grace Kimnach said. “And they are used to as well. They certainly have different rules depending on which class you’re in. We’ve been in class previously, for many years, so it’s what we’re used to. And it’s really good competition.”
Having two competitions under their belt before the Skutt competition, the group had already experienced victory and defeat. They started the season off winning five awards on Jan. 19 at Elkhorn High School. Colton Knott Andrew Jones Claire Hayworth Adelaide Horst and Jada Randecker got 1st in OID Junior Andrew Jones got 2nd in Humorous Interpretation Junior Clara Pearson got 5th in Champs Informative Sophomore Nitcha Khammahavong got 2nd in Nextin Informative and freshman Sophia Cacioppo & Lucy Sanfilippo got 5th in Duo.
“It was really, really cool that we were talented enough to break finals,” speech team member Lucy Sanfilippo said. “I just felt very good about how hard we worked.”
However, for their second competition on Jan. 26 at Lincoln Northeast High School, the group didn’t see as much success, winning only two awards. The OID team, consisting of: Andrew Jones Colton Knott Addie Horst Claire Hayworth and Jada Randecker earned third place and junior Alyssa Hoscheid earned sixth in Nextin. The fact that they didn’t earn as many awards as they previously had, ended up motivating the team and inspired them to do better.
“I learned that you can always improve in your speech no matter how far you think you are in it.” freshman Timothy White said.
Today and tomorrow, the group will get another chance to apply the lessons they have learned from practice and previous competitions. Today they are gone again competing in the Marian High School Black Book-a-thon Speech Tournament, and then will turn around and compete again tomorrow in the Millard North Invitational.
Then, next week, on Feb.16, they will travel down to Lincoln East High School for the Spartan Invitational, which will be the conclusion of the speech team’s regular competition season. Districts will be on March 9, at Lincoln East High School, then the NSAA Class A State Speech Championships will be on March 23, at Kearney High School.
