On Saturday, Jan. 25, Lincoln Southwest is hosting the Silver Talon Speech Tournament, which is one of the largest speech meets of the season. Thirty or more schools and over 700 students and guests attend each year. This competition has two preliminary rounds, semi-finals and a final round with awards scheduled to be at 6:00 p.m. The LSW speech team will be working concessions and hospitality at the tournament.

“Helping at the tournament can be long and stressful but it’s especially fun since I have friends with me,” sophomore Danielle Ibe-Ikechi said. “In the previous year I also enjoyed helping at the tournament because I got to talk to a lot of cool people while working concessions.”

Some of the jobs the speech team will be doing are welcoming competitors, giving out team and judge packets, running the info or help table, round postings, going around the school and helping competitors and judges to find their rooms, Impromptu and Extemporaneous Speaking (extemp) topics, awards and concessions. All of these jobs are going to be run by the students with appointed leaders to each department.

“This tournament is a chance to invite people into our building and provide a well-run, exciting, very large tournament experience for our guests,” Mr. Matthew Heimes said. “We’ve been doing this tournament for 23 years now, but in recent years it has become one of the largest invitationals in the state.”

The tournament will run all day with registration starting at 7:30 a.m., rounds starting at 8:30 a.m., semi-finals at 1:30 p.m., final rounds at 3:30 p.m. and finally, awards at 6:00 p.m. This is also a flighted tournament, meaning that each round is split into flight A and flight B with certain events in each flight. Flight A contains Extemp, Humorous Interpretation, Informative Speaking, Oral Interpretation of Drama and Poetry and flight B contains Duo Interpretation, Entertainment Speaking, Persuasive Speaking, Program of Oral Interpretation and Dramatic Interpretation.

“We do a true semi-final round, which doesn’t happen anywhere else, and the rounds in the tournament flighted,” Heimes said. “It is also cumulatively scored, meaning the entire tournament including prelim, semis, and finals are all combined to determine the winner.”