Rising senior Sydney Hutchinson is one of several students attending the national speech and debate meet in Birmingham, Alabama this week. She filed this report on June 19 regarding the team members’ experiences thus far.

Yesterday the entire team went to a speech exposition hall and got lots of free handouts. Blake made it a point to grab a pen from every signal booth. I, one the other hand, came home with over 60 lollipops. Thankfully, we had no problems with registrations this year. This doesn’t imply there were problems last year, but there is always a chance something does not go right,

Today was the first day of competition in the team’s qualification events. These events are humor, original oratory, world school debate and congress debate. We all sat in rooms for at least 70 minutes four times today. Sitting along with us, there were at least two judges and lots of observers. Some speeches seen today were absolutely astonishing, while others were a lot less than astonishing.

None of us will not know if we have made it to the next round until we finish the last two rounds of prelims, which conclude tomorrow morning. I was in Huffman High School today. This was conveniently the one with the rooms that had no air conditioning whatsoever and had multiple beeping smoke detectors. Anna and Blake were in Parker High School with no problems. Laura was in Woodlawn and had to perform in a concession stand. Jack was downtown speaking in ballrooms today.

Our day started before 6 and ended after 6, and we are not even close to finishing. At the end of the day, Everyone had a semi-easy day, but since it is the national competition, semi-easy means pretty rough when compared to state competition.

Only one pair of nylon tights was sacrificed to the speech gods today.