The Palisade Speech and Debate team could not make it through Vail a few weeks ago to get to the 4A States, however, they still managed to send competitors to the 5A State tournament. Rhylin Cooke and Mila Stepan and other competitors from Central and Fruita made the long trip to Denver over Spring Break. They represented Palisade, and the Western Slope, in the huge tournament amazingly.
Both Rhylin and Mila were on the bus that got turned around in Vail pass on the way to the 4A States. It was a huge disappointment for the whole team, but Mila and Rhylin weren’t ready to be done. They sacrificed a chink of their Spring Break to go compete in 5A. The 5A tournament was a big step up in competition for the girls since the circuits they’d been competing in around Grand Junction were 4A or smaller. However, this didn’t deter the girls at all.
All the Western Slope competitors competed for two long hard days, and all of them did incredibly. Rhylin worked her way through the semi-finals and finals of Dramatic interpretation and ended up getting 4th place at 5A states, an amazing feat. On top of that, Rhylin qualified for Nationals this summer in Phoenix. Mila and the other Western Slope students competed hard and kept up against the super-tough competition.
I talked to one of the Speech and Debate co-captains, Kennedy Stephen, who had this to say about the girls’ success, “I feel really good, especially with Rhylin joining halfway through the season, also in an event we don’t have much experience with in the past. And her qualifying for nationals in the first place was a really big deal! Same thing for Mila at state, 5A is tough competition, and it’s really hard to keep up with that, so the fact they’ve both been breaking to semis and finals is incredible.”