Speech team heads to state

The Bobcat Speech and Debate Team had a mixed bag of success last weekend at the Worlando Beach tournament in Worland, bringing home fifth place in 3A.

While seven of the team members made the cut for semi-finals, all but one, Katie Burrows, didn’t garner the scores to take them to finals.

Burrows, who went into semis ranked fourth, came out of finals with a fourth place finish, bringing home the only award for the team.

Burrows and her duet partner, Ashley Brawley missed finals by just three points as did Hannah Hu in oratory. Hu also fell short of finals with her informative.

Tyler Kay moved on to semis in both drama and humor, but didn’t move on to finals, either, nor did Kyle Mosser with his drama.

“I think the biggest disappointment was Kyle’s (Mosser) drama,” coach Cindy Glasson said. “He went into semi-finals ranked first with a score of 2-1-1-1. There were competitors in his semi round that he had already beaten in preliminary rounds, but a different panel of judges marked him 5-4-2 in semis, dropping him out of finals by a single point.

“That kind of tells you how the entire weekend went. Of course, there is a different group of judges at every tournament, but when we go to Worland, we either do really well or completely bomb, even though the kids are doing the exact same thing they did the previous weekend.”

Glasson said there were an awful lot of fifth and sixth places in their scores, something they don’t see a lot of at other tournaments.

But, she also says they put this past weekend behind them and move on to State and National Qualifiers.

“These next two weeks are intense,” Glasson said. “We’re at State in Lander, Thursday through Saturday this weekend and then National Qualifiers next Thursday through Saturday in Rock Springs.

“Practice is me nit-picking the small stuff because I don’t want to over practice them. They are keyed in and ready to go.”

Glasson is hesitant to make any predictions as far as either finishing tournament is concerned.

“As talented as this team is, I have to keep reminding myself this is only their second year of competition,” she said. “State, of course, is huge, but we have a couple of ‘dark horses’ some of the teams in the southern part of the state haven’t come up against. They have every chance to go all the way.

“National Qualifiers is smaller because it only includes those schools in the Wind River District, but it is the more intense of the two because it is the one that determines who represents Wyoming at the National Tournament in June in Ft. Lauderdale.

“I’m going to keep my prediction on that one under wraps. I’ve been pretty good at picking them over the years, but I don’t want to jinx anything!”

The Bobcats begin competition today (Thursday) at Lander Valley High School.