With mid-September rolling around, it’s time for the EPCHS speech team to start their season. Coach Melissa Diggle, who was a high school speech team member herself, is coming up on her ninth year of coaching the EP team. Speech consists of fourteen events, each with their own unique elements that make them fun and challenging. Students can choose to be involved in just one or multiple events. Senior Emma Nunnery is about to begin her third year on the speech team, and she spent her first two years excelling in Oratorical Declamation speaking. She is not only looking forward to expanding her horizons in the form of adding Informative Speaking to her repertoire, but is also excited to meet many new students from other schools and spend time with the team. Abby Huffman is also a senior, and is excitedly awaiting her fourth year on the speech team. She is an exceptional public speaker, and has demonstrated much success in her two events: Original Oratory and Dramatic Interpretation. In her own words, she is, “...most looking forward to making memories, listening to what my teammates are doing, and just enjoying my senior year of speech.” Along with one other senior and many prospective new members, this year’s speech team seems to be facing a very successful season.

FTC, or First Tech Challenge, is a competition where teams must design, build, program, and operate a robot to score points. It is a STEM program with thousands of international teams, intended to help students build skills needed for success in their future careers. An explanation of this year’s rules can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsitvZ0JaDc.

Technophobia is one of the three FTC robotics teams at EPCHS, and meets in the A hallway on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays from 5:30-8:30. The team consists of 4 sub-teams, including the build team, the programming team, the drive team, and the outreach team (The outreach team is in charge of arranging service hours, social media presence, and spreading the word about the team and FTC). These sub-teams are not mutually exclusive, as many team members are on multiple teams, (for example, most of the drive team is made up of members of the build team). We do not assign team leads, and we make decisions by consensus, not through hierarchy. Our website can be reached at https://www.technophobiaftc.com/, and feel free to email us at technophobiaftc@gmail.com for any questions.

Key Club is an international, student-led organization dedicated to helping our community. It gives students the opportunity to serve those in need locally, as well as building leadership and organizational skills. It is a great way for students to earn NHS hours as well. EPCHS Key Club meets once a week every Tuesday morning at 7:35 in the library, for short 5 minute meetings. You can find us on Instagram @epchskeyclub. We offer volunteer opportunities almost weekly, with fundraisers and community events. Some of our previous events include Egg My Yard, Festival of Lights, and Stand Down for Homeless Veterans

The Girls Cross country team competed at the Silver Streak XC race at Galesburg on September 3rd. This was a start for all of the girls’ high school Cross Country careers except for the junior Kelsey Koch, who was a state qualifier in the 2021 season. The rest of the team consists of the sophomores Bryanna Schurter and Addison Hutson. The freshmen are Alyssa Beck, Brianna Benedict, and Elyse Strunk; although, Brianna and Elyse didn’t run due to injury. Overall it was a good race for the girls who will take the experience of their first race and apply into their future competitions where they are bound to continue to improve.

On September 17th, the EPCHS Marching Band Competed at the 2022 Pontiac Indian Showdown. After participating in an hour-long clinic given by a professor from Vandercook College of Music, the band went to a nearby park to eat dinner. Even though we still had a few hours left until we performed, we took the time at the park to enhance our visual performance. We then drove back, got in our uniforms, warmed up, and then performed at 7:00. All in all, we performed well, scoring first in our division, best winds and 3rd place overall. Elijah Lucjaz, a senior this year, says “It was a solid performance. It was good, but we can do better”.

Click here to view the performance.