By Ashley Bradley/ne news editor
The NE Campus speech and debate club traveled to New Orleans for the Phi Rho Pi National Tournament and came back with seven awards.
The team competed with more than 400 students from 62 schools all over the nation in the largest speech and debate tournament in the country.
The group won two silver medals in the individual events sweepstakes and the overall sweepstakes.
Ashley Borck, Elizabeth Price and Rachel Jensen all won bronze for their pieces in informative speaking, dramatic interpretation and prose interpretation, respectively.
Gold winners include Price and Jensen for duo interpretation piece “Make Believe” about two sisters and Oladipo Oyediran for a prose interpretation piece based off the book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider by Ishmael Beah.
“I played the older sister,” said Price about her duo piece. “It’s all about embracing the past, so you can fully live in your present.”
In Price and Jensen’s piece, the older sister causes her younger sister to die. Though the younger sister is dead, she returns to mend the relationship.
Because Price and Jensen both have sisters, they would picture themselves in the same scenarios with their siblings, which they said made it easier to transform into the characters.
“Tragedy cannot destroy the family bond,” Jensen said. “Love will always overcome tragedy.”
Oyediran said he got the idea to use Beah’s book from the coach and speech instructor Ilknur Ozgur.
“She had already read his book and met him at a seminar,” he said. “I picked it up and started reading it at the end of last semester, and we started picking it apart.”
Oyediran, originally from Nigeria, said because the book is about a boy from Sierra Leone during a time of war, he was intrigued to perform the story.
“Every person on the team has made every other team member laugh and cry with their pieces,” Jensen said.
She has been on the team for only three months and said the team already feels like family. Joining the team has been one of the best decisions she has made, and she advises others to give it a try.
“When I first thought about joining the team, I imagined everyone would be cliquey,” she said. “I got down [to the class] and found out how incredible everyone is.”
She tried to explain how strange the bonds are between her and her new family. She came up with an analogy to describe the quick connections the team members have made.
“It’s like living in a vacuum,” she said. “In that pressure of performing, we have become closer in the past three months than I’ve become with my friends in the past three years.”
