Speech, apparently, is the word

We had a speech team meeting at school today. After six years of coaching our high school's speech team, I've finally figured out a few things. Instead of waiting for the speech season to start, at a time when I'm bogged down in directing the one act play, and we end up heading to our first speech meet with the kids woefully unprepared, I decided this year to start early in the year. Our goal today was simply to identify which kids were interested in being on the team, and what speech category they wanted to be in, and whether they had a "piece" for their speech. I think it was a great idea to get started now instead of four or five months from now. Last year, we had 18 high school kids on our team. We lost only three (two to graduation, one to another school), and should have added 8 who were 8th graders last year, in the high school now, giving me 23 returning members, assuming everyone was coming back.

Twenty-eight kids showed up for the meeting, including nine first-timers. A few former members didn't or couldn't attend the meeting, and a few told me there were not interested in being on the team. But I was amazed at the number of "new" kids we had show up today. We should end up with an even larger team than we had last year (30 including high school and junior high kids), our biggest team ever. It's now a matter of fitting kids into the "right" categories, and finding pieces for them to perform, but we've got a few months instead of a couple weeks to do that. I'm looking forward to speech season already.