On Saturday, January 26th, Lafayette’s Speech and Debate team will be competing at Bardstown’s invitational tournament. This is a very important tournament for our team, being the last tournament before the regional tournament at SCAPA Bluegrass.

Not only is the team excited about it being the last tournament before regionals, but also because Ms. Christian, the team’s coach, is an alumnus of Lafayette and was the team captain of the speech and debate team for multiple years. Because of this, it is very important to the team that they have a decent amount of team members that show up to this tournament out of respect towards their coach.

So far, there are eight people who are competing at this tournament out of the thirty-five team members. Among these eight competitors, there are two students signed up to compete in impromptu speaking, three students competing in improvisational duo, one person program of oral interpretation, two in poetry, one in dramatic interpretation, one in broadcast announcing, and three in Congressional debate. As you can see, they probably won’t have a huge turnout at this tournament if more people don’t sign up to compete in it. However, there is a somewhat high number of categories per student, so there is a possibility that this might make up for some of the students who won’t be able to attend the tournament. One of the coaches, Ms. Bolinger says, “Our dedicated team is a force to be reckoned with and I have no doubt they will make Lafayette proud.”

Overall, if they can get more of their team members to compete, this should be a great tournament for the team due to the current competitor-to-event ratio. So far, our team has been doing well, but not in comparison to the other teams. But, with some encouragement for more team members to participate, our team has a great chance of doing really well at the Bardstown’s Invitational tournament.