Metea Speech students were anxious to see who would break into the final round at the Tournament of Roses hosted at Naperville Central High School on Dec. 14. The final scoring in the tournament placed Metea in second place, overall, where Metea finished with 415 points. Metea ended with 16 members going to semi-finals and 10 in the finals. 

The speech team is a student lead organization that has students compete within 14 different categories. There are three preliminary rounds that the students do and the judges rank the students from a 1-6 scoring rank, one being the best ranked. The cumulative scoring is taken from all the rounds to see who breaks into the finals. In Speech, the categories are not scored in terms of schools, but per student, which means up to five students into the category can break into the finals. 

“It’s like running a track meet where you have different heats, but we call them rounds here,”  co-head coach of speech Matthew Wolski said. “How you perform within those three rounds is then put up against everyone else and if you’re one of the top performers you can compete against the best.” 

Some of the categories that are offered include limited prep, which is where you have a certain amount of time to prepare your speech and then perform, radio speaking, where you are given 45 minutes to cut a script and deliver it like the news, and writing events which include performing an original comedy. There is a big variety of speech performances the students can perform, which allows students to show their special skills and have the tournaments be an excitement for all members. 

All members work hard with practicing their skills, with daily practices, so their best performances are shown in the tournaments. For most students, they build one piece of work and practice on strengthening it throughout the season in order to receive higher rankings in tournaments. There is an emphasis on the four pillars that keeps the team strong; family, health, faith, and academics. The organization keeps growing year after year, as new freshmen and sophomores are encouraged to join the team. 

“It is super important to take constructive criticism and critiques regarding presentation, delivery, and writing so that you are able to improve as much as possible,” freshman Zara Saleem said. 

The captains on the team include seniors Avyay Surampalli, Aryanna Amin, Madi Palmquist, and junior Bhargavi Sriram. Captains make the roster and choose events for each of the students, at the beginning of the season. Also, captains summarize their team’s performance through all the tournaments in a weekly newsletter called the MUSTCHAT. Their position is to provide leadership skills and practice of discipline to ensure that the team will have a successful season. 

“I believe that this season, our team is stronger than it ever was in the past. Not only do we have a lot of past talent returning, but we’ve also got an insane amount of newcomers who are competing like they’ve been on the team for years,” captain senior Avyay Surampalli said. “We have a goal to have a full team qualify for state this season. It’s definitely going to be hard but we can achieve if we keep working at it.”The next tournament will take place next week in Coal City. If a student is interested in viewing specific rankings from the Tournament of Roses, they can visit https://twitter.com/mvhsspeech?s=20