After an incredibly long day at Decorah High School, Cedar Falls High School’s speech team managed to reach success after finding out that two of their groups were nominated for All-State.
On Feb. 7, the 14 speech team groups that received a Division I rating at Districts got on board the bus early in the morning once again, but this time they headed to the state contest at Decorah. Like Districts, the students in speech team spent the majority of their Saturday either in the hosting school’s gym preparing their performances or traveling around the building to see other performances done by different schools.
How State differs from Districts is that instead of one judge who rates the performance, there are three. This makes the rating process much more challenging since there needs to be at least two of the judges that give a I rating in order to achieve it overall. The results ended up with nine groups receiving a Division I rating and five groups receiving a Division II rating.
Receiving an All-State nomination is very difficult to achieve at State, but the two groups from Cedar Falls that came through were Readers Theater – “I Don’t Want To Talk about It” and Group Mime – “Friendship & Freedom.” However, only Group Mime will be performing in Ames while the Readers Theatre group will just be invited to attend.
Head speech coach Alyssa Unertl said she is satisfied with how the groups did at State. “I think everybody did a great job at getting ready, and I think overall you can look at the ratings and you can see that everybody had a great day.”
Junior Tori King is one of the four members in “Friendship & Freedom” who will represent Cedar Falls at All-State at Ames. “It’s very exciting. I’m very proud of our group because it’s a pretty big deal.” King said. “It’s not often that people make it to All-State, and I think we did really well.”
One of the primary reasons why King thinks her group did so well was due to the group’s coach giving them a lot of pointers. “He’s very good at constructing a good mime,” King said. Despite the results, Unertl added that the judges ratings don’t define the group as a whole. “All-State really is just judges’ opinions, and they just pick who they think did a great job on that day. Unertl said, “I think those two groups where they all worked really hard and they worked together as group. They were really committed to what they were doing.”
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