If you have some attitude and confidence, and want to flaunt it, speech and debate could be the place for you. As a senior at East High, I wanted to challenge myself by trying new things, so I joined East’s speech team to leave my comfort zone while applying skills I’d learned in theatre previously and use them competitively.  Even if you have no prior experiences, you just have to have to be willing to try new things, get out there, and have a winning attitude for your whole team.  At first, I was hesitant if I’d fit in or do well, but the team this year has some great people who would welcome and help anyone, and the team is lucky to have the coaches we have to guide our way to winning. Marcus Viney is new to East this year transferring from teaching at CSU; he and Ashley Schulz help coach students for the speech section, and Matthew Prevedel is the coach for debate.  This will be Schulz’s twelfth year coaching she also competed during her high school years as well. “I love the students, I love it here at East, I couldn’t ask for anything better,” said Viney about his first year experiences.  “I didn’t do speech before this, I came into the world of speech much later, after college, when I was starting to become a teacher I found out about it, I already loved argumentation and debate from my background in philosophy, and since I found out about it, I knew I had to do it.  And getting to work with Schulz and Prevedel is amazing, I feel like I hit the jackpot getting to be with them, they couldn’t be more supportive, they can help me with anything.” When you throw a big group of competitive speakers and performers together, you get a lot of crazy weekends.  Speech and debate is typically for high school and college student, who travel to many schools to perform monologues (humorous and dramatic), oratories, duos, congress, and many more pieces.  The meets last almost all weekend to perform multiple rounds in order to see who makes it to the final rounds; with each competition, students get points to letter and have the chance to leave the tri-state area for Nationals. If you are interested in any category, contact these three teachers sometime soon.  Underclassmen do have the chance to come and participate late and be considered a consistent member by next year.