Walking through the halls of Westside and seeing students talk to the walls isn’t an everyday occurrence. But with the speech competition season in full swing, practicing is a must. Westside held its own speech tournament Friday, Jan. 16.

This is the fifth year the Westside speech team has held its own competition. Volunteers helped set up for the tournament the days leading up to the tournament. The competition started with 20 competitors and has grown to include over 300. Westside’s team does not compete in its own competition. Brownell Talbot took first place, Millard North placed second and Lincoln East placed third at the competition.

The speech team, co-coached by Jeff Grinvalds and Jennifer Paskach, has been competing for 5 years now.

 The team competes every week starting in November to the end of march. There are nine different events in which to compete including poetry, dramatic interpretation, humorous interpretation, duet acting, interpretation of drama, persuasive, informative, extemporaneous and entertainment.

Speech tournaments are scored similarly to track. Students are entered in different events and then the student goes through heats. If a student does well in the early rounds, he progresses to finals, and the students who make it to finals score points for the team.

Head coach Jeff Grinivalds has a long background in speech; he has been involved since high school.

“I wanted to share my love with people so I became a coach,” Grinvalds said. “I’ve been coaching for about 20 years.”

Speech has grown throughout Westside and has even trickled down into the middle school. Tina Christensen is the speech coach at the middle school and is getting students interested in speech at a younger age in hope to continue on into high school. 

The speech team competes this Friday, Jan. 22 in Fremont.