Havre speech competes at Hawkers Invitational in Bozeman

Press release

The Havre High School speech and debate team traveled to Bozeman over the weekend to compete at the largest, most competitive tournament so far in the state, with the Blue Ponies earning some wins at the tournament, although none brought home any hardware the Havre head coach said.

“All of our kids earned some good marks and got some great and constructive comments from the judges in Bozeman,” head coach Tim Leeds said. “I hoped some of our speakers would have gone further, and we had the talent and skills to do it, but things didn’t break our way.

“The main thing was the experience our kids got,” Leeds added. “I want us to apply that experience this weekend in Choteau and after Christmas, especially at divisionals in Laurel and state in Belgrade.”

Havre took a squad of 10 Blue Ponies to the tournament, which saw more than 700 students enter in competition. The Hawkers Invitational had 34 teams including all AA schools, with some bringing multiple JV squads as well as their varsity squads, and teams from other A, B and C schools as well.

Havre’s Elaine Atkinson, a sophomore in her first year of competition for Havre, went the furthest for the Blue Ponies. Atkinson, performing a cutting from William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” earned high marks from the preliminary judges, including a first-place ranking in one round.

Those marks broke her into the quarterfinal single-elimination round. Atkinson did not make it into the semifinals, ending up in 23rd place out of 65 students competing in humorous interp.

Varsity Lincoln-Douglas debater Kaleb Gardner, a senior, almost made the cut into the single-elimination outrounds. Gardner defeated two Billings West High School debaters in two of the preliminary rounds, but lost close matches to students from Three Forks High School, Missoula Sentinel High School and Great Falls High School.

Other Havre students competing over the weekend were policy debaters LillieAnn Mecklenburg and Dartanion Kaftan, informative speaker Melanie Veith, public forum debate teams Xavier Ulano and Simon Hart and Joram Randolph and Noah Teasley, and novice Lincoln-Douglas debater Jerzy Borowiecki.