again, wowed by the signature speech team's results

! They totally dominated the competition at the Memorial meet, nearly doubling Mater Dei's second place point total. This is REALLY impressive. But before breaking open the champagne, a warning to any high school speechies in Southern Indiana: DON'T GET COMPLACENT. This early in the season, there is room for exponential growth. Keep this in mind: A few years before I started speech, Reitz High School was nationally known. It had a panthenon of speech gods. Now, all of Evansville combined probably only has 4 or 5 nationals level competitors. In 2002, Reitz had a national foreign extemp finalist, origial oratory semifinalist, and poetry CHAMPION. Big shoes lay before you. If you are to continue the abruptly interrupted Southern Indiana Forensics legacy, here are some goals: 1) get your performance polished enough that you can enjoy the speech meets instead of worrying about what mistakes you made (I speak from personal experience). You can place well at Sectionals by completing this goal. 2) make the performance enjoyable. Could you give a speech in Barnes and Noble, and keep the interest of the patrons? Mike Knight, et al could. If you achieve this goal, you are ready for semiing or finaling at state and perhaps qualifying and doing well at nationals 3) help those around you get past step 2. this will have benefits for fun, and for placings. it's definitely more fun to do well if you aren't the only one doing well. but also, say you have an extemp team of Paul Musgrave, Mike Knight, and Melody Berry. Suppose at this meet, extemp has three sections. Now, if only Paul and Mike did well, then even if they got 1's in all of their preliminaries (teammates are never in the same preliminary section unless there aren't enough sections), someone could also get 1's in preliminaries by beating Melody. If instead, Mike helps Melody become insanely fluent and convincing, then Paul, Mike, and Melody can have a stranglehold on all the 1's in the preliminaries. When this goal is completed, the team will be state powerful and nationally competitive. Myself, I only partially completed step 2. I hope the Evansville teams can get to the third level and put Eville back on the NFL map.