Speech Team held its end-of-season banquet on Thursday, May 14th. Aside from being a festive way to commemorate the students’ and coaches’ hard work, every year, the banquet acts as a ceremony during which the new speech captains are announced. For the upcoming 2015-2016 season the captains are current juniors Jackson Cobb, Sarah Gong, Aekta Mouli, and Daniel Reynolds.

The series of actions necessary for being elected into captainship are slightly more complicated than most. The first step on the “campaigning” process is to post the answers to three questions that the coaches pose in the EHS Speech Facebook group.

“They ask questions like ‘What qualities would make you a good captain?,’ ‘What ideas do you have?,’ and ‘How can you manage being a captain?,’” Sarah Gong of Storytelling explains.

Once all of the juniors who want to run have answered, the first round of voting is held in Ms. Anker’s classroom. This year, twelve candidates tried out and they performed two minute speeches for those who wished to attend. The current captains tallied up the votes and narrowed it down to the top seven. The top seven people moved on to the banquet, where there were slips of paper upon which students ranked their top choices of captain from one through four.

“We have a lot of plans [for the upcoming season] for team building,” Gong shares, “We’re planning to have the whole team meet up at Blackhawk Middle School over the Summer and hold a Speech Olympics. That way everyone can get to know each other before the season even starts.”

During the season, the team will be implementing “speech workshops,” and a “speech senate,” two concepts that will serve as ways for team members to help each other and for category captains to exhibit their leadership skills.

Beyond introducing new ways to improve the team, the newly announced captains have decided to further develop old techniques, too. “We want to build on what the captains this past year have done because they’ve done an extremely good job of preparing the team for the season as a whole and keeping the team together- making it like a family,” discloses Jackson Cobb of the Duo and Drama categories.

Another captain, Daniel Reynolds of Poetry, seconds the team-building notion, “We’ve learned that if you’re closer as a team from the very get-go of the season, that will lead to being more successful.” Aside from encouraging team bonding, not many changes will be taking place in the upcoming season; at least, none as of yet.

“From day one we’re just going to work on being extremely close as a team, because we don’t really need more talent,” Reynolds states, confidently. “We’re already good as it is.”