After sending two participants to
State last year, more students on Bishop Noll’s speech team have their eyes set on a championship trophy this year.
Junior Angela Luna is one of those students who is determined to win it all this year. Angela competes in 3 events in one tournament. Her main event is informative, where she speaks about immigration and border con- trol. She also does impromptu where she is given a topic on the spot and has to give a 5-7 minute speech about that topic. Her final event is Original Ora- tory (OO). In this event, she discusses a problem in society and provides a pos- sible solution for that problem.
So far this season Angela has placed 3rd and 4th consecutively and has also placed in the top sections of her events. She gives credit to practice and confi-
dence for helping her win these spots. Many of the students on the team last year ended up being one spot away from qualifying for state and that in- tensified the fire for the current sea- son. The team is growing and that has helped the team gain confidence.
Angela says that she believes Bish- op Noll will be sending a big group to state this season. She also believes that the team will have at least one national qualifier.
“Bishop Noll is definitely going to raise some eyebrows and is going to go to Dallas this summer,” Luna says.
Another student with an eye on a State trophy is senior Rebecca Vazquez, who competes in is Original Oratory.
“In this event, I would say my strengths are my soft voice and de- meanor. It’s good to be gentle as well as persuasive when giving an OO. You
don’t really want to come off as to ag- gressive because your judge might not like that,” Vazquez says.
She also believes that she is a pretty good writer, so this makes her speeches very well written majority of the time. Rebecca believes that one of her weak- nesses is that her mind gets spacey at times and this causes her to forget little parts of her speech. When this hap- pens, she has to stand in front of the room in awkward silence until she re- members what she is supposed to say next. Another struggle that she men- tioned were the early Saturday morn- ings that she has to wake up and all she really wants to do is sleep. But, accord- ing to Vazquez, it is all worth it because she really enjoys the tournaments and has set a goal to make it to state this season.
For anyone who is thinking about joining speech Rebecca suggests going to the speech team and requesting in- formation.
“There’s so many things you can do for speech; we’re bound to find some- thing you enjoy,” she says.