The speech and debate team has been on a hot streak, with adding new events, winning sweepstakes, qualifying for state, and traveling all over Texas. The speech and debate team won 3rd place sweepstakes at a recent tournament and has a number of people going to state.

“I am qualified for state, Austin is qualified, Sharika is, and then we have some people who are very close,” said Senior Alcess Nonot, who is the speech and debate captain.

The speech and debate team has traveled all over Texas to seek success, even with a small team they still place high and have won sweepstakes at 2 tournaments.

“Usually people underestimate us, because we just started when I was a Sophomore so we have only been a team for 2 or 3 years so we are really new compared to other schools who have had programs for a very long time,” said Nonot. “We are a really small team but we make a really big impact place-wise so we do really well.”

The team has worked hard for the all-year season and has been competing all over Texas.

“We try to got to local ones around Austin,” said Nonot. “We also go to ones around Corpus Christi and up in San Antonio it just depends on how they are scheduled and what the team is looking for.”

The team has a few events they specialize in, and have even qualified to state for.

“We have a lot of people do congressional debate, Foreign and Domestic Extemp is a big one, Interpretation events, we do every single Interp event like Poetry and Prose and Dual Interp and even Oral Oratory so we try and cover all the events at a tournament. Speech and debate covers both categories. Debate is where you will go up against other people from other schools, and you debate over a resolution or in Congress you debate over legislation and Interp is more like taking poetry or even books and interpreting them, it is basically competitive acting in Interpretation.”

Mrs. Salinas, the sponsor, has been putting in a lot of hard work and time into planning, and making all of this possible.

“It is very time consuming,” said Salinas. “It takes a lot of planning both on my part and for those who are attending the tournaments. I personally have had the last 5 to 6 weekends that are tournaments, and it is having to miss some school for students, and really preparing and getting ready to go for the tournaments and dedicating one’s entire weekend to speech and debate.”

Speech and debate has even changed from when she was at Hendrickson High School to now and making it work for the team currently.  

“A lot of the structure is still the same in terms of competition events and the flow of the preliminaries, semi-finals, and finals,” Salinas said. “I am trying to inform myself more of the debate side of things since I did more Interpretation when I was in high school. My goal is really to get into some of the debate side of things more since they are so spread all over the place as far as skillset goes, learning everything is important.”

Salinas is confident with how the team is doing, and that their personal goals and even her’s are being surpassed this season.

“I think that our team is doing awesome right now, and I say that because we have new members who are really putting themselves out there and trying new events for the first time and are doing so with confidence and grace,” Salinas said. “And then we have our varsity members who are exhibiting so much dedication and drive to be successful for certain events so I am very proud of them.”