Speech and debate wraps up regular season with second at Corvallis

The Columbia Falls speech and debate team wrapped up the regular season with a second-place finish at the Corvallis virtual tournament.

The continued improvement was led by strong performances in both speech and debate.

In debate the team was excited to see a second place finish by Calie Johnson and Raphe Salmon in public forum debate, which was the first time the team had broken into out rounds this season.

In speech, Chloe Coberly and Griffin Conger had strong performances in both of their events to lead the speech team. Coberly took first place in impromptu and fourth in dramatic interpretation, while Conger placed second in both original oratory and dramatic interp.

Frenchtown won the meet with 172 points.

Head coach Blake Ladenburg was encouraged by his team’s performance this week.

“We made up ground in events that we needed to, and overall had a strong tournament,” he said.

The team had their best performance of the season during preliminary rounds, but slipped in out rounds. Still, they improved from the week before when they took third at the Custer County meet.

At Custer, the team was led by a first-place finish by Eddie Chisholm in Lincoln-Douglas debate, and third-place finishes by Conger in dramatic interp and Eleanor Hollingsworth and Finley Sundberg in policy debate.

The team will look to make final adjustments this week before the Divisional tournament on Saturday being hosted virtually by Polson. The top 12 competitors from each the east and west divisional will move forward to the state tournament the following weekend.

Each team needs to provide virtual judges for each tournament if you are interested in judging at any tournament please email b_ladenburg@cfmtschools.net.

Corvallis results:

Memorized Public Address

4th Lillian McDonald

Informative Speaking

5th Taylor Stephens

Extemp

5th Aiden Judge

Dramatic Interp

6th Zack Tillman

Humorous Interp

5th Ruby Davis

Policy Debate

3rd Emma Stephens and Tre Finley

7th Eleanor Hollingsworth and Finley Sundberg

Public Forum Debate

2nd Calie Johnson and Raphe Salmon

7th Brayden Crawford and Aiden Rohn