With all of the steps to keep people safe going around, Covid-19 has canceled most of the interactive activities at school. Students and staff have to take many precautions just to make sure they don’t contaminate anyone. Speech and debate students have been affected a lot by this, and now they have to go to virtual tournaments. 

Speech and debate have made some drastic changes. Instead of actually going to the tournaments, they now have to either record themselves, or they have to video chat with the other speech and debate kids so they can debate against each other.  

“We make a video in advance of our piece and load it on YouTube,” said sophomore, Sheridan Lucas.

Now that speech and debate can’t travel like they used to, they have to record themselves or they have to live stream their debate in front of a judge. All these new procedures might make the speech and debate participants more stressed, and now they have to treat this like homework, and let’s face it, most of us aren’t even good with homework.

 “I honestly think it’s more stressful because you need to make sure the judges can see and hear you,”  said Lucas.

They can either do their speech once and get it over with or make sure that it’s flawless or spend hours on it. Initially, this new level of stress might cause the speech and debate kids to make more mistakes in their tournaments.

In the end, these kids are still doing what they love the most, mask or no mask. They’ve adapted to the new rules Covid-19 has put into effect right away. It might not be what they wanted, but in the end, they have to do it to compete.