HURON — The Huron Speech & Debate Team traveled to the Lewis & Clark Speech & Debate Tournament in Yankton on Jan. 26-27.
 Aberdeen Central won the tournament, with Brookings placing second.  Huron finished 12th out of 18 teams, with only a small part of the team traveling to Yankton.
Top finishers from Huron:

• In Programmed Oral Interp, Jasmine Snow placed first.

• In Duet Interp, Jayden Ritter and Asia Bindert placed sixth.
“We traveled small this weekend,” said head coach Mitch Gaffer. “Between All-State Band try outs, flu/illness, and other student obligations, we lost a lot of competitors before we even walked out of the school! We only took 9 students out for competition to Yankton.”
Gaffer praised the group’s interp entries, with Snow, Ritter and Bindert each called to the stage to receive awards.
 “In debate, we are still struggling to get cases that can win consistently,” Gaffer said. “Huron was not able to advance out of the preliminary rounds of competition. We just started debating new resolutions. 
“Public Forum Debate started a new resolution at this tournament dealing with abolishing the Capital Gains Tax,” he added. “In LD Debate, the new resolution deals with abolishing plea-bargaining in all court cases. We will examine our current case strategies at practice this week and see if we can make improvements to get us over the hump.”
The next tournament for the team is the final Central Forensic Conference (CFC) Tournament that will be held Saturday, Feb. 3, at Brandon Valley High School. Currently, Huron is in fourth in the CFC.

CONTRIBUTED
Members of the Huron High School Speech & Debate team earning awards are, from left, Jayden Ritter, Asia Bindert and Jasmine Snow.