According to speech team co-sponsor Anna Kaiser, speech team will be attending no meets the upcoming weekend of Feb. 22 and 23.

“There is one coming up this weekend, but a lot of our students are participating in Dance Marathon, so we’re going to hold off and see if there’s one the next weekend,” she said.

Kaiser said speech team has missed several meets in the past few months, and she and speech team co-sponsor Jacleen Joiner are working to make them up. Elaina Xiong, speech team leader and senior, said she was planning to attend the most recent cancelled meet, which was cancelled due to technical difficulties.

“We’ve had a lot of weather problems as well as technical issues,” Kaiser said. “The website we use to sign up for meets hasn’t been very cooperative lately. For some reason, we had a hard time getting in, and by the time we got in the school that was hosting the event was full. But that was okay, the weather was pretty bad that weekend anyway.

Kaiser said, “The ones we are able to go to we always have a good number of students who can go, and they’re very cooperative and patient with us, and we appreciate that. It’s fun to get to know them more and more each meet. I foresee most of them coming back next year, and we’ll develop stronger relationships.”

According to Xiong, there are more freshmen in the club than in previous years. Xiong said Kaiser and Joiner have been holding more meetings than the former sponsor held in the past.

“We haven’t had (meetings) as often as we were hoping, but our speech members are really involved, so it’s hard to meet all at once,” Kaiser said. “A lot of them like to practice on their own anyways. I hope next year we can have a more consistent meeting schedule, but we still do meet once every couple of weeks.”

Xiong said she has prepared a Dramatic Interpretation piece titled “The Gift of Tongues,” which she planned to bring to a cancelled meet and is now preparing to take to a later competition.

“Some events are more fun to judge than others,” Kaiser said. She said Dramatic Interpretation is one of her favorites. “They tend to be said. I cried once. Dramatic Interpretation is very intense.”