The Panther

Friday, Feb 11th at Norfolk Senior High School

801 Riverside, Norfolk, NE 68701

 

Dear Speech Coach:

 

We are excited to once again host The Panther This tournament will give your team another great opportunity to compete against competitors from all over the state! Students may also triple-enter at the coach's discretion. There will be an individual sweepstakes award.   

 

Registration deadline is Wednesday, Feb. 9th at 5:00 P.M. Registration will remain open for drops until Thursday at 3:00 PM. 

 

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. To ensure the best quality judges in their events, please indicate their judge preference with either "All Events," "Pref Interp," or "Pref Public Speaking." If your judges have no preference, you should mark them "All Events." I will try to use this when scheduling finals and individual rounds. 

 

We will be using SpeechWire's Eballots, which means ALL of your judges need to come with a charged laptop, iPad, Chromebook, etc. We ask that your judges do not use their phones to update Eballots. With this feature, you also need to provide an email with each judge you enter. They will use this email to log in to access their digital ballots on the day of the tournament.  All judges are to provide their own stopwatches. 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.

 

We will once again be using SpeechWire's blast capabilities. You will want your students and judges to sign up for this as we near the tournament. 

 

All nine NSAA events will be offered, as well as Impromptu Speaking and Program of Oral Interpretation. We will use the 30 minute prep time in Extemp.

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. We may also have “Merit” and “Consolation” depending on numbers in many of the NIETOC events. In addition, we plan to honor Al Janovec, one of our former coaches who lost his battle with cancer several 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 once again 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), informative, duet acting (duo interpretation), and program of oral interpretation. For additional information about NIETOC please check out this link: http://www.nietoc.com/  

 

A wide array of concession food and drink will also be provided in the lobby near the gymnasium. All food and drink must remain in the commons area.

 

A full tournament schedule can be found online at Speechwire.com

 

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

 

Forensically Yours,

 

Lukas Ziemba, and Sara Dahlkoetter