Last weekend, the Eagan Speech Team travelled to Marshall and had a great tournament. Twenty-two members of the speech team placed, from novices (first years) to varsity members.

The team also had two champions, one in varsity and one in novices. For the novices this means they have to perform their speech in four preliminary rounds, and then twice in semi-finals and finals. Varsity members also have to go through the four preliminary rounds, but they have quarters before semi-finals and finals. To get to those rounds, the competitor needs to “break.”

The speakers get scored in each round on a scale of one to five or six (depending on how many people are in their ring). The judges rank the competitors in the ring, with one being the best. To break at Marshall, the speakers needed a low enough cumulative score. Then they can move onto semi-finals for novices, or quarters for varsity members.

Mila New is in the category of Varsity Dramatic Interpretation and shared her experience at Marshall. She said that Marshall was a really large and nice school, and it really helped that it was easy to navigate. With the hours of practice they put in, Mila felt comfortable with her speech, which allowed her to have lots of fun and made it easier to compete. Her speech went really well, and she broke to semi-finals.

Novice Informative member Miriam Lebowitz, who placed second in finals, expected that Marshall would be a huge tournament, and that everyone would the speech team would do great. She learned a lot, and met a lot of new people and competitors. Miriam’s speech went really well, as she got second in finals. However she says that there’s “room for improvement, which is the point of the speech team.”

The Eagan speech team did an amazing job at Marshall, earning second place as a school. The next speech tournament is all day on Saturday, in Apple Valley, and the Eagan Speech twitter (@EaganSpeech) will be putting up updates all day.