Mahan School of Little Women: Upstate Tournament

As I mentioned in my last post, we traveled to our first tournament of the season on January 6th. It was held in Central, SC at Southern Wesleyan University. It was quite hectic before we left as I am serving as Registrar and Logistics Coordinator for the region so I was on the computer answering lots of e-mails. Victoria also decided that she couldn't do one of her Informative speech because the topic, human trafficking, was too emotional for her after researching it. She is required to do a platform speech this year so I told her she had to write another speech for this tournament. I did give her permission to use her script for this tournament. She chose to write on introverts and then asked if she could switch to the category of After Dinner Speaking. She was given permission and finished writing the speech on Saturday.

The first 1.5 days of the tournament are the preliminary rounds so Tuesday afternoon began the announcement of breaks. This is when announcements are made about which students are moving on in their respective events. Debate breaks were announced first and we were excited to hear that Victoria had made it to double octas in Lincoln Douglas. She did not advance any further but it did earn her a spot at the Regional tournament at the end of the season.

Members of our club, Apolojax

Speech breaks were made Thursday morning and the excitement was high!

We found out that Victoria broke with her Open Interp...

and Hannah anxiously awaited to hear about Humorous. Can't you see the agony?

Her prayers were answered and she made it to semifinals!

Later in the day, many of our club members sat together to hear about speech finals. We hadn't heard about After Dinner Speaking because the low amount of students only allowed it to break to finals.

The girls anxiously await and find out they both made it to After Dinner finals!! Yes, that was the speech Victoria rewrote and managed to memorize in time!