In January, the New Waverly High School UIL tournament was held for area schools to compete in different academics contests. Willis had entered this tournament as usual, and swept in speech and journalism events.
One of the many competitions that were present was the section of Prose & Poetry Interpretation. In the poetry line of competition, Willis knocked it out of the park with a 1st place by Chege Wachege, who had never attended a competition beforehand, 2nd place by Annemarie Carman and 5th place by Annabelle Smith-Grimm.
“I’m super happy,” Carman said. “Getting second was especially amazing because of everyone I went up against. I hope I can keep doing good and maybe even make it past districts.”
Not only that, but Prose & Poetry results led to Willis getting 1st place in prose by Isaiah Higgins, 3rd place by Carter Bernard, 4th place by Alexzander Talkington, and 6th place by Nalani Washington. Both aspects of the competition were hard, but Willis pulled it through with their two first place finishes, and other great results from students.
“I feel very confident in my skills for the district competition,” Higgins said. “Mainly because I have already advanced from districts before so I know I’m able to do it again, and secondly I’ve dealt with competition at region and know how to handle it. What I typically do to place first at events is practice the day beforehand and record myself to see what I can fix and then make sure I have the basis of my intro memorized. I plan to keep up my winning streak and keep working on my pieces and workshopping them to the best that I can, and to have my coach help out when needed.”
Without much surprise, the school’s journalism team also swept all of their competition with the different divisions of competition that were at New Waverly. Not only did new faces of the team get a chance to shine, but Willis still held it strong with their placements.
“I had a great experience there, but I didn’t think I was gonna place in anything,” Crabdree said. “It was great though because I did get 2nd place. It makes me feel really great because Ms. Meachen now trusts me with headlines, and it helped my overall all-state journalism points, because now I’m at 26. I’m just gonna keep trying to get good placements overall for more points towards all-state journalism, because that’s the overall goal for this year.”
The accomplishment of results at New Waverly are just another step in the right direction of how strong the school is for its UIL teams. It seems as if there will be no slowing down Willis when it comes to sweeping their competitions in any aspect of academics.
“When I went into verifications for Feature writing, I was not expecting to get first place,” junior Isabella Zabala said. “Victoria Medina read the placement paper before me and was happy to tell me the news. At that moment, I felt very proud of myself; my first thought was how excited I would be to tell my mom. I’m normally not the best in feature writing, so knowing that I’m growing with my journalism skills is something I feel accomplished about.”
