4th in State: A Rebuilding Year

At the beginning of this year, there was no doubt that this would be a "rebuilding year" for speech and debate team. Last year was the 2nd year of existence for Wilson speech and debate and we place 5th in the state, won several invitational tournaments, and broke some PIL's district records. The problem was, however, that nearly half of the team graduated, leaving very few people with proven success for this year. Accordingly, we fluctuated around a 5th placing at each of the tournaments we attended. This was until the Mt Hood CC Tournament, where we dominated, taking 2nd and crushing our primary opposition in the PIL: Madison (speech teams in PIL: Grant, Lincoln, Madison, Roosevelt, Wilson. Grant and Roosevelt aren't that good. Lincoln has a number of good people, but the team as a whole is too small to be effective.). The Mt. Hood Tournament was the last tournament before the district and state tournaments. It was nice to end the "regular" season on a high note. You can read my previous exhaustive entry on the district tournament: we did well (2nd), but lost severely to Madison. We ended up qualifying 11 entries to the state tournament out of roughly 21 entries to the district tournament. So when heading out to the state tournament at Linfield College (Boo! U of O is a much better place to hold it), I surmised that our team would be lucky to place in the top 10 in the state (there were 60 or 70 schools at the tournament, to my knowledge), and we would probably be somewhere in the top 15.

The drive out was fun. I drove out with Joe Sackett and some other people after school on Thursday and we have some humorous moments, like switching lanes really fast, losing the car that was following us, performing radio shows via cell phone to another car, and some other things. We got down to McMinneville (a very sad little town of 25,000) where Linfield is, and we got set up in our hotel. It appeared that Dan and Catherine (who had left that morning to go to the debate portion of the tournament, starting before the speech portion) had gone 3-1 in public debate, and indeed they qualified for octafinals. We stayed up until about 1:30 AM and did some did some interesting things. About 12:30 AM, Dan, Leeor, and Kadish started their calculus, and they did that for an hour before going to bed.

The next day, the draw for my 1st round was at 9:30, so I watched Joe and Clara be amazing at dual as usual. Then I found Shiyuan of Lincoln and we got stuff set up for our extemp. round and strategized. I was 6th speaker in my room, and this was the 1st extemp. speech I had every given in competition and the 2nd ever. I got a good topic for the speech and got a little bit extra prep time because the speeches ran slightly late. Dan, Leeor, and Shiyuan came to watch, probably out of friendly pity. I was miserably nervous, but it turned out well for a first speech. The two judges rated me 3rd and 4th out of 7 in that room, which was good because there were some really good speakers assigned to that room. The speech was decent although it had its rough edges. I then ate lunch at one of Linfield's cafeterias of sorts.

Dan and Catherine's octafinal debate was up next. At this point they were in the top 16 of the top 40-ish teams in the state. Unfortunately they were up against another PIL team. The topic was whether marijuana should be legalized, and they were arguing in favor of the resolution. Being the smart individuals that they were, they set economics as the value of the debate. With excellent, well-defined economic arguments, fabulous clarity in delivery, the opposition's failure to stick to an economic debate, and the opposition's poor delivery, Dan and Catherine easily won the debate (although it was stupidly decided by a 2-1 vote).

The next extemp round was up, and I proceeded with great nervousness. The question that I picked was "Should the US or the UN is the world's foremost peacekeeper?" The grammatical error in the topic provided a little leeway in definition, so I changed "is" to "be" to answer it. There was some pretty solid stuff in my bin and in my head on this topic, so I was able to craft some good support. Since I was the 5th person to speak in the room, I was able to get a bit more time to practice and a peanut gallery consisting of Catherine and Shiyuan. The speech went relatively well, although it had its hiccups. I did really well in the room though. Both judges rated me 2nd out of 7 in the room. I hung around for awhile before going out to dinner, but everyone ditched me because of lack of car space. So, I went to a grocery store with Colin and grabbed a sandwich, then came back for the semifinalist announcements and After Dinner Speaking finalists. Hannah incredibly managed to make it to finals in ADS (her first ADS ever), and she gave an excellent rendition of her piece. I am especially fond of it because it's about language and mentions Esperanto. I have a personal connection with that piece... But anyway as it turned out, we got everyone into semifinals... kind of unprecedented, especially me, considering I had no experience (but then again, I doubt that experience makes very much difference anyway). It was really cool.

So we went back to the hotel and made platonic love over conversations about speaking, chemistry, calculus, and debate. We also watched part of this hilariously stupid movie called "The Passenger" on HBO. The acting was incredibly bad, although we found some deep symbolism in the color of the walls of the protagonist's house... Then mysteriously it was the next day!

Our alarm had failed to wake us up, probably because the snooze button was jammed down, so we had approximately 20 minutes in which to dress, eat, and pack. After some initial troubles, some of which involved Jon dazedly stumbling around getting the hotel keys and his car keys confused, we got back to Linfield. My first round was at 9:30, so I had some time to watch the Prose semifinal. Clara gave an excellent rendition of her piece from some prequel to the "Ya-Ya Sisterhood." Then it was off to my round. I was only the 2nd speaker in my room, meaning that I got slightly less time to prepare. The topic was not my favorite either: "To what degree should the US support the current Afghanistan government?" It asked a question in a matter of degrees, which is harder than a yes/no question. Leeor and Dan once again were kind enough to be my peanut gallery, but the speech wasn't great. My introduction was less than ideal, but I salvaged things in the end. Because this was a semifinal round I was also going up against the top 1/2 of all the speakers that qualified for state. When all of the factors added up, I ended up being ranked 4th, 5th, and 5th by the three judges. As Dan later calculated, this put me at about 10th in the state for extemp: I can't complain because that is just awesome. This is definately going to be my event for next year. I should have listened to Kyle Stoneman a year and a half ago when he tried to get me to do extemp. Anyway, I went was part of Shiyuan's peanut gallery and then went back to the common area.

Finals were posted and EVERYONE except for me and one girl in one of her two events made it to finals. Now that was simply amazing. All of the observers went to watch the Prose finals which were amazing, and then the Dual finals which were even more amazing. It was amazing, oh yes. (You can tell that I'm getting tired of writing, even though I've done this at multiple sittings) Afterward Dan, Leeor, and I went to this awful burger restaurant with a monkey on display. It was classic low-calibur semi-rural American food. The monkey and it's proximity were really the only attractions, seeing as we could have gone to any one of several good Thai or Japanese joints in "downtown" McMinneville. (confused? Yes, the main attraction of the place was the monkey that they kept in a plexiglass room, although "Elvis" was not out) We quickly returned for the awards ceremony. So without delay, here were the results:

ADS: Hannah Hickman finaled
Expos: Emily Davis got 2nd
Extemp: I made semi-finals
DI: Joe Sackett got 2nd
Prose: Clara Hillier and Natalie Heikkenan finaled
Dual: Joe/Clara finaled
Radio: Emily made semi-finals
Congress: Megan made super-congress
Public: Catherine/Dan made quarters (top 8)

Things were looking pretty good for us. I was a little disappointed when we failed to take 5th place as a team. I though it was over for our hopes of winning a trophy. But then they announced 4th place, and lo and behold, out of 60 or 70 schools, we placed 4th. It was really cool. Then what was almost as cool was the fact that Madison placed 2nd, making the PIL the uber-dominant district of the speech world. Ashland won 1st, but that's mostly because they unfairly won the top two spots in dual. The Oregon Shakespeare Theater is in Ashland which kind of makes them just a little good at drama/speaking competitions. This is their 11th 1st place finish since 1990. Blah, blah, blah. So that was that. We went home, we partied, we had fun... Yay!