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Canfield High School wins state speech tournament
By Denise Dick
Canfield
Canfield High School took first place in last weekend’s Ohio High School Speech League State Tournament, a first in the history of the school’s program.
Students from Canfield and from Austintown Fitch also topped competitors from across the state in four categories.
“It really has been an evolution over the last several years,” said Jeremy Hamilton, director of Canfield’s speech and debate program for the past six years.
The program has been at Canfield since at least the 1970s, and last weekend marked the speech and debate team’s first time as state champion.
The Canfield team earned 12.5 points more than the second-place winner, the biggest margin of victory since 2009.
“Each year, we’ve got more and more students buying into what it takes to become a champion,” he said.
The school had been state runner-up the previous two years.
“It’s been our senior classes,” Hamilton said. “Each of them graduated and lifted that bar higher and higher.”
The seniors provide the leadership for the team.
Saturday evening’s awards ceremony at which the winners were announced generated a lot of excitement for the team.
“We were all on cloud nine over the weekend, and today, we’re just walking around kind of basking in it,” Hamilton said.
Canfield also won the G. Robert Santo Award for combined excellence in Drama, Humor and Duo. It was the first year for the award.
The teams from Austintown and Cardinal Mooney placed fifth and seventh, respectively.
The tournament this weekend at Canfield High School was the culminating event for the speech-and-debate season and drew about 900 students from 81 schools across Ohio.
The speech season begins in October and runs most Saturdays through the fall and winter.
Categories include debate and individual events ranging from Humorous Interpretation and Dramatic Interpretation to Prose/ Poetry Reading and Impromptu Speaking.
The state champions from Canfield are Nathan Pecchia, who won in the Dramatic Interpretation category, and Andrik Massaro, who won in Lincoln-Douglas Debate.
From Austintown, Jarrett Kerpsack and Logan Pasqual are state champs in Duo Interpretation and Albert Jordan is state champion in Oratorical Interpretation.
Several other Mahoning Valley students placed within the top seven in various categories.