The Logansport High School Speech Team held its callout meeting on Sept. 7. The purpose of the callout meeting was to recruit potential new members to join this award-winning, state championship-attending team. The team is coached by English teacher Jessica Kranz as head coach along with coaches Ashley Hayes, Chris Miller, and Joyce Pasel. The team is also helped by senior Jasmine Zimmerman as head captain along with seniors Eli Bault and Carissa Dawson as co-captains and senior Emily Sanchez as historian.
“I’ve been teaching and coaching for 21 years, and I love it,” Kranz said. “Every year is different, and I love getting to hear the new ideas that people have.”
The team works together to present and share their speech pieces, which they present to judges at tournaments. There are a wide variety of events or different ways of sharing pieces. These events include informative speaking, prose, duo, poetry, discussion, extemporaneous speaking, humor, drama, and several others. On the speech team, students choose the events they want to compete in while the coaches train the team to present these at tournaments.
“The events I do are duo, poetry, and prose,” Dawson said. “In all three events, I present stories that have already been written by other people, and I act them out.”
The first tournament of the year takes place at Logansport High School. On Dec. 9, several schools in the area will come to compete.
“The last time we hosted a tournament was in 2018, and it was still all paper judging when we did it last,” Kranz said. “But now, it’s all digital. I am very nervous to be hosting this year, but it warms my heart to see how many hands are on deck to put this together.”
A large variety of people are coming together to make this event happen. Parent volunteers, coaches and speech team alumni will all come together to judge, guide, and generally just help the members of the team. English teacher Josh Bault is both an alumnus and parent of the Speech Team.
“I love getting to see what the speech team has become,” Josh Bault said. “When I was a student at LHS, I participated in prose and impromptu, and I went to the state tournament several times for impromptu. Now, I help out occasionally. I judged the sectional tournament last, year and I hope to help out more.”
While individuals are given the chance to work alone on their individual speech pieces, the overall goal of the team is to come together and help one another. Team-building is important, and it is a goal to encourage one another.
“I try to be everyone’s cheerleader,” Zimmerman said. “Everyone on the team knows me, and they all know they can ask me anything if they need help with their pieces.”
