On March 17 and 18 the Fossil Ridge High School Speech and Debate team competed in the CHSAA State Tournament hosted by Rocky Mountain High School. The students from Fossil that qualified for state were Public Forum team Holly Ryan, senior, and Ethan Sherman, sophomore, Public Forum team Max Banks, senior, and Parker Banks, sophomore,  and Maddie Fink for Dramatic Interpretation. Only the Public Forum team of Holly Ryan and Ethan Sherman made it to the top eight in their event as quarter finalists. For Public Forum, debaters are given a topic ahead of time to prepare for. They must research and prepare to argue for both sides of the topic.

This is Holly Ryan’s fourth and final year of competing in speech and debate events at the high school level. She believes that for the Fossil, “The true team spirit was evident this year, and I truly treasured it”. She also has enjoyed success in qualifying for nationals and at state. She will be attending Colorado State University and hopes to continue speech and debate at the college level.

Ethan Sherman,sophomore and first time debater, said, “as this was my first year in forensics, it was exhilarating to qualify for nationals.” Sherman considers the Northridge tournament, qualifying for nationals, and placing in the top eight in public forum at state to be among his favorite moments of the season. He hopes that he can find a new partner to compete with in Public Forum next year, but if not he will switch to Lincoln-Douglas debate.

Speech and debate coach Grant Campbell, who is also an English teacher at Fossil, said that this season “was probably the best one of my career.” However he notes that the season did not start off very well. He says, “the very first tournament we didn’t even have anyone make it to a final round in any event. Then a couple weeks later at Northridge, we easily win.” This season there were a lot of new faces on the team. One thing that Campbell was most excited about the season was that an assistant coach joined the team; Chase Julian, a freshman over at Colorado State University. Campbell said “he’s really done a great job at helping split up some of the coaching duties.” Campbell is sad to see the seniors go, but there are a lot of “young faces coming back”. He said that he looks forward to “seeing some more progress with next year’s juniors.”