While the districts boys and girls basketball games brought much hype among students, other Westside activities participated in their district tournaments as well, with good results. The debate and speech teams attended their district tournaments to qualify for the National Forensics League National Tournament, held in June in Kansas City.

The district speech tournament was held Feb. 28 to March 1 at Millard West High School. One speech member, Senior Naomi Samuel, qualified for the national tournament in extemporaneous (extemp) speech. Although many speech events require constant practice at memorizing one speech, extemp requires participants to prepare a speech on a topic that is picked right before the round starts. To prepare for the district tournament, Samuel stayed updated on current events she thought would be picked as potential topics.

“To prepare, I basically just read the news constantly all week to make sure I was updated on what was going on,” Samuel said. “I also filed as much as possible on expected topics I presumed I would get.”

Samuel said there was more pressure on her to do well at the district tournament this year because she has qualified for nationals the past two years, so there was a lot on the line if she didn’t qualify.

“I was a little nervous because I have qualified two times before,” Samuel said. “But I was also kind of confident knowing the people in our district who I had to compete against, and I felt pretty prepared.”

The national qualifying debate tournament was held March 7-8 at Lincoln East High School. Although the debate team was feeling confident going into the tournament, its members did feel some anxiety going without a head coach, since the head debate coach, Dana Christensen, had recently resigned from his job duties as head debate coach.

Policy debaters juniors Lia Hagen and Peyton Wells qualified for nationals, going undefeated in their district. Wells explains her feelings going into the tournament.

“Lia and I prepared a lot for districts compared to some of our previous tournaments based on our workload,” Wells said. “But there was also that feeling of anxiety going into a tournament without a head coach. I mean, our assistant coaches are great, but as a team we’re kind of on our own now. It was definitely a big learning experience.”

Although the head coach is no longer with the team, Wells said that motivates the team to work together towards a strong finish at the state tournament in a few weeks.

“Our goal is to win state,” Wells said. “I think the biggest motivator for us right now is to show that even though Mr. Christensen left, we want to show that Westside debate isn’t going to go anywhere soon.”

Juniors Eric McAtee and Teigen Swanson are the first alternate to nationals in Public Forum debate, and junior Patrick Hodson and freshman Lily Saker are the first alternate in Policy debate.  Both the national speech and debate tournaments will be held June 15 through 20 in Overland Park, KS.