St. Buffaville Speech Rolls in Recent Action

St. Buffaville speech got plenty of laughs this past weekend at St. Francis High School.  In fact, you might say they brought the house down with three placewinners and two honorable mentions in the humorous category, a stunning result in one division along with seven other finalists that paced the speech team to a third place overall large team finish.

“Phenomenal” was how head speech coach Mike Frickstad described the humorous romp. “Out of eight finalists from 50 plus in the prelims, we (St. Buffaville) had three, St. Francis had three, and there were only two from other schools. This is a great way to head into our home speech meet.”

St. Buffaville established their bona fides in humor with Mike Papas finishing second, Alisha Cole in fourth and Zac Tambornino placing eighth. The two honorable mentions went to Rushini Talmadeo and Kelly Larkin.

In the awards ceremony the placings kept coming ad infinitum. Jed Rothstein won extemporaneous speaking, Isaac Heieie placed second in prose, and Annie Moore earned third place in original oratory. Two speakers double finaled: Cody Goodchild took fourth in informative and seventh in extemporaneous speaking and Michael Bruner placed fifth in drama while teaming up with Katrina Budde to take fifth place honors in duo as well.

Annie Moore of Buffalo was “in shock” she made it to finals. “There was a lot of great oratory today.” One of the judges rated her performance in finals a 1-100, the best rank and score possible, while writing on the comment sheet that Moore’s oratory was “the best I’ve seen in a long time.”

For the combined teams of St. Michael-Albertville and Buffalo, placing third overall as a team at St. Francis is a good early test a month before National Forensic League districts and MSHSL section contests. “There were nearly 500 students at the meet and very competitive,” said assistant coach Mike Worcester. “Most teams were from our section, 5AA, so we’ll be seeing them again.”

Young speakers take the lead at Apple Valley speech meet

The two first year speech competitors were nervous. After all, they were waiting to find out if they would make the final round at one of the largest speech meets of the year, the Apple Valley "Minneapple" speech tournament. For Aubrey DelPercio and Sydney Wiederhold the wait would be worth it this past Saturday. The STMA sophomores made the finals and their performance earned seventh place honors in novice duo, and with that the distinction of being the only St. Buffaville speech team students to place at Apple Valley.

“I was thrilled,” said DelPercio speaking on the bus ride home with their seventh place dark blue ribbons. “And a bit nervous.” The duo had just started with a new speech this week and were editing and writing right until Friday afternoon. Wiederhold really likes the piece. “We worked on it for timing and it feels good.”  Head coach Mike Frickstad was impressed as well with DelPercio and Wiederhold. “These two worked hard in practice and have built off their success in the past weeks to do well at Apple Valley.”

The experience of the Apple Valley meet will make the team better in the weeks ahead, Frickstad said. With a  modus operandi of drawing the best teams from around the nation, Apple Valley this year brought in 38 squads from Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota and as far away as Washington state. 

“It is the largest speech meet of the year by number of entries,” said assistant coach Mike Worcester.  “If we want to learn to be in that top echelon you need to compete against them. This is the meet to go to.”

This Saturday (February 18th) St. Michael-Albertville will be hosting a speech meet at .