On Saturday, March 7 at Alvarado Middle School, the Golden Gate Speech Association hosted its State Qualifying Tournament in Speech. Sonoma Academy left before daylight with a squad of six team members, each hoping to gain a bid at the State Tournament to be held on April 18 in Southern California. 

 

Our competitors fought through three preliminary rounds, each hoping to break to the finals. Senior Ian Hartley was seen twice during the day sprinting from a room holding the International Extemporaneous event to the Impromptu room. As a competitor for just one year, Ian certainly made a name for himself in the world of speech. While he did not break to the finals, he finished a very successful season respected by everyone in Bay Area speech, especially by fellow members of the Sonoma Academy team. 

 

Out of our six competitors, five of them broke to finals. Junior Lucca McKay's hard work and dedication paid off as his original piece, a satire of the world of speech competitions, earned him a position as an alternate to the State Tournament. Seniors Olivia Smith and Robert Webber's duo performance of The Wizard of Oz, featuring Robert's golden voice and Olivia's powerful acting, placed them as the first runner up. Sophomore Elizabeth Kolling was just shy of making the State Tournament, and she also ended up being the first runner up. 

 

Seniors Christopher Reed and Jack Lasseter really did it. While I was in the tab room, I was approached by none other than Tommy Lindsey, the legendary coach of James Logan, the subject of a documentary film about high school forensics. Tommy grabbed my arm and asked, "What's all this I keep hearing about some guy driving a motorcycle around the entire classroom?" He was referring to the end of their piece, The Dark Knight, when Batman leaves, an unsung hero, on his Bat Bike. Christopher Reed has been known to drive his invisible bike over tables and chairs, circle judges, even leave the room and re-enter. Later, at the awards ceremony another coach approached me and asked if she could meet the boys. I introduced her, and she shyly asked if Chris could do something for her team, which seemed to consist of ninth grade girls. Of course Chris was up for it. They wanted to see him ride his invisible motorbike one last time, and to squeals of joy, he rode it back and forth, straight at them, and around them. Jack and Chris also captured the attention of their judges that day, who selected them to represent the entire Bay Area at State this year. Congratulations. 

 

Junior Clara Spars will be joining them, if they can forgo attending Prom this year, in the van to LA. She too won one of the coveted spots for her original oratory, a speech she wrote herself about the benefits and harms of our tendency to make lists. We make to-do lists; we make top-ten lists; we focus our attention of lists of top colleges. Unfortunately these lists, while adding clarity to what could be chaos, also tend to pit things against each other. Lists, she discusses, have also been behind some of history's darkest moments. Behind the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust was a list of six million names. Lists have tremendous creative potential as well as destructive power. Clara urges us to reflect on the kinds of lists we make as we wind our way through our hectic lives. She even suggests that for every list of top students or contest winners, we make another list: a list of things that we are grateful for. This list doesn't diminish any one item on the list. Its length is a celebration of everything that is good rather than a ranking in which the further down the list you get, the less value you find. 

 

The Speech Team closed off the year with a big group hug and a cluster of enormous smiles. The success this year is definitely linked to how much fun this group has together practicing and competing as a team. It is also a sign of the great leadership by captains Robert Webber and Olivia Smith. They truly set the tone.