Forensics - Missed It By That Much, But Won In Many Other Ways

Unfortunately, Abby didn't make it into finals.

She placed 7th, missing the 6th place required for finals by 3 points - out of 1,100 possible points.

At State Finals the difference in competitor's scores and performances really is measured in millimeters.

7th in oratory in the whole state is nothing to sneeze at. Quite an accomplishment for someone who only started forensics in November and had never done any public speaking before.

She took not advancing to finals well, and it will give her something to work towards next year.

She made lots of new friends, enjoyed the effort required to compete and really came out of her shell, so it was a highly positive experience.

She's sad its done for the year and already misses the friendly competition and how the competitors, while all trying to win, still support each other and almost all have really good camaraderie and sportsmanship.

Judging these competitions is hard. At the state level the talent of the performers is amazing and it does become rather subjective. Most of my assessments through the competition were typically in line with other judge's perspectives of the competitors, and sometimes not so much. You always want to be fair and its hard to always pinpoint exactly what it is about a performance that really is better than another, especially when both are outstanding.

I judged the Duo finals and to say the performances were all stunning would be an understatement. Incredibly well done, and I had to ask all the competitors at the end how the schools all happened to bring in professional actors as ringers. Not kidding, these kids could take these performances to a professional stage and the audience would be well satisfied.

Again, differences in performance came down to millimeters. I was consistent with one of the of the other two judges as to which performance came in first, and that one won the entire state competition on points throughout, so I was at least assessing the performance in line with all the other judges as to how it was really outstanding. I had swapped places for 2nd and 3rd with the other judge, and was pretty consistent on 4th, 5th and 6th place. The third judge was very different in perspective. Note that we don't discus our ranking with the other judges and it is all independently decided on, so it is interesting to see where we all agree and disagree.

After the awards ceremony, the team all went out to a restaurant together and this is a really good bunch of kids - bright, learned, well-mannered and quite a few will be going on to college next year, and the rest returning to compete in forensics again.

The coach, a teacher at the school who does this on a voluntary basis, puts in a ton of work all year to make this happen - talk about a teacher making a real difference for a lot of kids. She did a fantastic job indeed and the team did quite well with many placing in the finals.