Four members of the Forensics team made it to state this year with a piece that they have each been working on individually. This consisted of juniors Alexa Fleegal, Gace Werch, Luyen Pham and Cecilia Bruce-DeMuri. The team recently submitted their videos on April 8 to the state level, where they will be judged and have a chance to receive a medal. 

Due to COVID-19, none of the team’s competitions were in person this year, including state. The team was able to decide whether they wanted to compete live virtually or be asynchronous.

“This year we had chosen to do everything asynchronously, meaning we are not doing it live in case we would have issues with the internet, so we had to do everything pre-recorded,” Forensics Coach Nicole King said. “I believe judging is going to start sometime on April 9 and go through the weekend. For people who decided to do it live I think it will actually happen within the next week.”

Making it to the state level requires a person to have to score high enough at certain competitions leading up to state. 

“The first competition that they have to do is Sub Districts where they submitted one video and three different judges looked at it and scored it. They had to earn certain scores to move onto Districts. Then they made new videos and did the same thing over again. They submitted a video, they had three judges score it and then they had to get a higher score to make it to state,” King said. “This year all our students chose presentations that are the same literature that they get better at and use more emotion, to try and perfect their piece.”

Since each competitor from BHS chose to do a presentation they were able to use the same speech that they recorded before, but re-record it and make improvements for the next competition. 

“My piece was about how anger in women is perceived differently than how it is perceived in men. This is a piece that I have been working on since the beginning of the season,” Fleegal said. “Each judge gives you feedback. We got a print out from each of the judges and I had one comment that was repeated and that was eye contact with the camera. This is hard because it’s a camera and it’s not really the audience. When I re-recorded for state I made sure I did some more gestures and really looked into the camera for a long time.”

Although this year was not like previous years where the team would go to different schools to compete, but rather they recorded a video and submitted it, Pham states the task of recording the videos was not easy. 

“I tried to read over my speech once a day. However, it took me at least three hours every time I needed to record my speech,” Pham said. “To many people, recording a video might sound very easy but it’s really not, at least for me. I have to memorize a six-minute speech so every time something went wrong,  I’d have to redo it. Therefore, it took me forever to get a good one down.”

For Fleegal making it to state does not make her nervous, but rather proud that she at least made it as far as she could.

“I did not do Forensics my freshman year and because of COVID-19 last year I was not able to make it to the state level because our season got shut down, so I am really excited to see how I would perform at state,” Fleegal said. “I am not too nervous because I got to state so I am happy with whatever I get and am anxious to find out my score.”