By Pam Young
Four VHHS students traveled to Sonora Texas last Thursday to compete in the 71st Annual Sonora Speech Meet on Friday. These four included Viviana Sanchez and Samantha Cabezuela, who competed in Prose Interpretation. Our only entry in Poetry Interpretation was Hiram Cruz, and our only Extemporaneous speaker was Ryan Corrales.
At the tournament there were 23 schools: Alpine, Ballinger, Brady, Christoval, Comstock, Crane, Eldorado, Grape Creek, Iraan, Iron County , Junction, Mason, McCamey , Menard, Miles, Ozona, Paint Rock, Reagan County, Sonora , a Charter school from San Angelo, Valentine, Water Valley, and Van Horn.
We like to go to this meet because it gives us an idea of who we’ll face at Regional, as well as a preview of our competition at District. It’s always tough competition, but we enjoy a challenge, and in order to improve, we need to keep on pushing ourselves.
The local readers/speakers represented us very well. Because there were so many contestants, in every contest, our kids had to be in the top 2 in their rounds in order to advance. Therefore , only Hiram Cruz made the Semi-final round. There he placed 4th, so he didn’t advance to the Finals, but we were very happy with all our readers/speakers. A special thanks to Ms Crowley, who drove us to Sonora and back, then got up about four hours later to sponsor the other Academians at a Saturday meet in Monahans.
Our next outing will be March 4 at Plains High School. Until then we’ll be practicing hard trying to get ready for District Competition.
