The UNI Speech Team’s “Night B4 Nationals,” sprince showcase brought commentaries on social justice issues and more. Despite more serious topics, the performers often found ways to work humor into their speech.

The year’s most successful pieces were performed in the Mauker Union ballroom on Monday, March 28, the night before 12 of the team’s members, who qualified to perform at the American Forensics Association-National Individual Events Tournament (AFA-NIET), set out for Florida, the site of this year’s tournament.

UNI’s team has attended the AFA-NIET for the past several decades.

The showcase on Monday consisted of six full performances and several previews in order to give the audience an idea of what the team has been working on throughout the year.

These performances varied from after dinner speeches to poetry interpretations.

Jessica Wayson, senior comprehensive secondary science teaching major, said that each piece performed at the showcase qualified for nationals and that hundreds of hours of work was put into perfecting each piece for the big event.

“Each person has multiple events generally, so if you add it together, it piles up really quickly,” Wayson said.

Among the crowd of around 100 students, faculty and community members, many were delightfully surprised by the performances they saw.

Katie Kozak, junior interactive digital studies major, originally attended the event as a way to earn extra credit for a class.

However, upon leaving, Kozak said that she found a piece based on the true story of a young boy who died of AIDS particularly moving, titled, “The Yellow Boat.”

“I think it was a really beautiful interpretation,” Kozak said.

Abby Martin, junior communication major, was involved in speech when she was in high school, so she attended the event to see the differences in content. She also said that she enjoyed “The Yellow Boat” performance.

“At first, I was wondering where this was going, but how it all came together made my heart sink,” Martin said.

The speech team is currently at the national tournament at the University of Florida in Gainsville, where they will be for the rest of the week.

Over 80 schools from across the United States will gather to compete against each other for the next week, starting with three different preliminary rounds. Those who advance will move on to the quarterfinals, the semi-finals and the national finals.

Last year, UNI’s speech team placed ninth in the tournament, something that hasn’t happened in several decades. In the last four consecutive years, UNI has placed in the top 10.

Speech team co-director Sadé Barfield explained how difficult it is for a smaller school to achieve something like this.

“There are schools who are able to have 66 events [at the tournament],” Barfield said. “We don’t have enough people to get to do that, but to be able to compete on the same level as them is sort of a hallmark of our team.”

According to senior English major and speech team member Jake Westpfahl, the speech team owes much of their success to the quality of work they put into each performance.

“We’ve always maintained a pretty good amount of success at these tournaments, and I would like to think that we’re pretty well respected on the circuit,” Westpfahl said. “We’re not a really big team, but what we tend to focus on is quality.”

Westpfahl went on to explain  the team’s performance at a tournament in Texas earlier this year made him feel confident in the future of the team.

“We all did really well on the first day, and it’s really cool to see a lot of the younger people on my team have success,” Westpfahl said. “It’s nice to see them get their first taste of it, and you can see the want for more success coming through them with nationals prep. Being able to look at the younger team, it’s a really great feeling to know that it’s in good hands once I’m gone.”

As the AFA-NIET progresses throughout the week, the UNI Speech and Debate Facebook page and the Communication Department homepage will be providing updates about the team’s performance at the national tournament.