What You Need to Know

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Joining the Forensics team is a great way to get involved in a club, make friends, and enhance your speaking skills! Even though all of that sounds amazingly awesome, joining Forensics is a commitment that carries a few responsibilities. If you are willing to take on the following responsibilities, then you should consider joining our team!

Here are a few items that you need to consider before joining:

~Joining the Forensics team is no different than joining a sports team. We will have weekly meetings (or practices) that you are expected to attend. Failure to attend practices means that you will more than likely not be able to attend the tournaments. We understand that you have busy schedules and many clubs, sports, and activities to attend after school. Because of this, you will need to decide if Forensics is important enough to dedicate your time to ... perhaps in place of another activity.

~Finding or creating an acceptable piece to read for Forensics is your responsibility. We will gladly assist you, but the piece is for you! Ultimately, you will need to pick your piece, make sure it falls inside one of the speaking categories, and fits all of the requirements of that category.

~As a team, we can only bring 14 students to each tournament and 10 students to Finals. This means that not all students will be able to attend each tournament. When it comes to who will attend, we will decide as a team which 14 will go to which tournament. This might mean that everyone gets a chance to attend at least one tournament, or it might mean that we will select our top 14 speakers and bring those students to the tournament. Either way, we will make this decision as a team. As it was mentioned above, students who are attending practice regularly will be given the chance to attend tournaments before students who do not attend regularly.

~Your role as a team member is to be just that - a team member! This means that coming to practices simply to read your speech and then leaving is not acceptable. We understand this may need to happen a few times, but we expect that, as part of the team, you would listen to, help, and offer feedback to your other team members. This is just another reason why our practices are so very important.