The speech and debate team traveled to Edmond North for their first tournament of the season, earning third place as a team and several individual medals.

Junior Jake Lange brought home a gold medal for Foreign Extemp, junior Rachel Newman earned a bronze medal for Domestic Extemp, sophomore Alisha Hemani brought home a bronze medal for Monologue and sophomore Natia Lewchuk earned a bronze medal for original oratory. Overall, 15 students advanced to finals rounds in 13 different events.

Lange was happy with the results of the tournament.

“Going into that past tournament I felt relatively confident but I didn’t think I would do as well as I ended up doing, I didn’t expect to get a first place medal in FEX so soon,” Lange said.

Lange has been competing in FEX since the second semester of his freshman year.

“FEX is basically you walk into the auditorium or wherever you are competing and you’ll draw five questions from an envelope. FEX specifically its about international socio-politics, and you’ll select whichever one you think you have the most information on and can make the best speech about. You then have 30 minutes to prepare a speech on it using sources and actual factual information, you then have to go and give the speech in no more than seven minutes,” Lange said.

After competing in this event for two years, Lange is able to relax and do his best.

“I enjoyed the tournament. It was not too stressful or anything like that. It went well,” he added.

The rest of the speech and debate team includes: Christopher Ashton, Elina Avila, Nik Dawson, Kassem El-Samad, Jack Franklin, Kale Henning, Zachary James, Joshua Kimbrough, ViaFaith McCullough, Sahrin Moytree, Conner Mulvaney, Sirisha Poudel, Mitchell Williams, James Wood and Payton Woolard. Members outside of the class include: Arely Bernal, Aanahita Ervin, Maddy Fresonke, Camila Gonzalez and Sofie Gutierrez.