In mid-April the Elgin Community College Speech team concluded their season after traveling to Florida for the Phi Rho Pi National Speech and Debate Tournament.

The team consists of five students and has been competing since October. According to the team’s coach, Timothy Anderson, one of the challenges they had was that majority of the team was new this year and had no previous experience with competitive speech.

“The biggest challenge was trying to get everyone acclimated to how this activity works because they had very little experience outside of it,” Anderson said.

Throughout the year, each member of the team competes in a minimum of four events and has team practices and individual coaching sessions to improve and edit their speeches. This season, the team had two state champions and one region champion, and four national qualifiers which included, Alex Buckwinkler, Leya Ismail, Makenzie Kuzmanic, and Ellie Tate.

Buckwinkler advanced to semi-finals, received a bronze medal in the event of Prose Interpretation, and came in top twenty for that event.

Ismail was a national finalist, received a silver medal and was top eight for the event of Informative Speaking.

The team’s success throughout the season and at national’s allowed them to accumulate points and placed in the top six of twenty schools which led to them receiving a bronze medal in the Individual Events category of the Hindman Division.

“We still had a really good year where people improved a lot and I think that’s valuable in its own right,” Anderson said.