Dear Speech Coach:

We are excited to once again host the Panther Speech Classic! This tournament will give your team another great opportunity to compete prior to district and state competitions. Your entry, however, is not limited to only your district team entries.  This way, some of your kids who didn’t quite make the cut for your district team, can still enjoy another chance to compete.  Students may also triple-enter; just not in the same flight.

Registration deadline is Tuesday, March 3rd at 5:00 P.M.

We request that all coaches list themselves as an available judge in addition to any hired judges. Each school is to provide one judge for every five entries. Any uncovered entries will cost $15.00 per uncovered slot. Please ensure that your judges are either NSAA qualified or well versed and experienced with regards to the rules and expectations of speech competition. All judges are to provide their own stopwatches and must sign their ballots. All judges and coaches are expected to be available for finals.  If for some reason one of your judges is unable to judge finals, please include a $25 penalty fee.

All nine NSAA events will be offered, as well as Impromptu Speaking. We will have additional information regarding that experimental event on our tournament website.  We will allow electronic files for extemp prep. Because this is a multi-class tournament, we will use the standard one-hour prep time.

Entry fees are $8.00 for all events, with the exception of OID which will be $10.  Because we anticipate this being a large event, we plan to host both “Champs” and “Honors” finals. In addition, we plan to honor Al Janovec, one of our former coaches who lost his battle with cancer a few years ago, by naming our individual sweepstakes award after him which will go to the top six individual performers. We plan to recognize the top three squads for final team sweepstakes. The awards ceremony will be in the Johnny Carson Theatre.

We are also excited to announce that this year we are a national bid tournament for the NIETOC!!  Events that your students can earn bids in include serious prose (dramatic intep), humorous prose (humorous interp), persuasive (oratory), and duet acting.  The national tournament this year is right here in the Cornhusker state and will be hosted by Lincoln Southwest on May 8-10. For additional information about the NIETOC please check out this link: http://www.nietoc.com/

We look forward to another competitive but fun-filled tournament featuring some of the best talent in the state!

Forensically Yours,

Peggy Belt, Alyssa Hayse, Chris Begeman, and Amber Doughty