The Ft. Dodge tournament was our first real team venture of the year and Roosevelt Debate showed up very strong. The old Iowa Paradygm of this being a Dowling-Iowa City West-Valley world has been changed. Now its a Dowling-Roosevelt-Indianola-Valley-Iowa City West and Okoboji world. We did our part to keep the rich from getting richer:
1). Our novice policy team not only goes undefeated but never drops a ballot in winning their first tournament championship. Roosevelt policy hadn't won a round in at least 11 season--who knows how long since we had an undefeated tournament let alone a turnament without a ballot drop....40 or 50 years? Congrats to Coach Nate, Minh and Harrison--WOW!
2). Novice LD stunned Valley. The new Valley Coach sincerely congratulated Nate and I on our LD students Varsity and Novice on a job well done. He thought he'd sweep LD and that wasn't the case. Mirza mde finals of Novi LD, Taylor tied to break at 4-2 and lost it on one speaker pt and Liz held her ground with the best LD students in Iowa in Varsity. WOW!
3). Our PF showing was as expected but some bad luck didn't help things much. Adele and Amelia drew Olivia and Karnes in Octo fnals forcing a RHS close out (not good). The resulting time off for Amelia and Adele cost them the next round which is what usually happens in those situations. However, our mixing of PF students was positive: Eleni Cade and Chris Oman went 3-2 and Eleni improved with each round. Patch and Mclachian were an interesting team of true novices and went 1-4. They should have been 3-2 if it weren't for mistakes. They improved significantly with each round.
We will keep our PF teams in a mix for another month or two as will incorporate all of the new students into PF and give them all a chance to learn from one another.
4). Speech had a so-so night because most of our speech kids didn't enter. Extemp finished 1-2-4-5 with Sandbothe, Martin, Oman and Crane in that order. Alex Patch, a freshman, shocked everyone finishing in the top 10 with a 3-3-4-4 performance. Another freshman, Tess Yocum fnished 6th in DI. Mirza had a great night of extemp underway when the tournament committee pulled him out because of LD scheduling conflicts. We easily have the top extemp program in Iowa.
5). In Novice congress RHS finished 2-3-4-5 with Tess Yocum finishing 2nd.
Overall a great start to the season. Indianoloa is up this next week. Go Riders!!!
