By Nicole MOORE

On March 4, members of the newly founded Rosemont speech and debate team placed at the 2017 Mustang Invitational Speech and Debate tournament. The 12-hour event was held at Maple Elementary School in Fullerton with 17 schools and 256 students participating.

Twenty-three Rosemont students, including Avery Anderson, Jonathan Aydin, Isabella Aydin, Adarsh Chilkunda, Vikram Chilkunda, Lauren Curtis, Preet Dasai, Maneh Davityan, Stepan Derian, Kevin Dong, Ellena Gain-Kim, Henri Gang, Andre Garabedian, Denitsa Georgivea, Trevor Hall, Joanne Lee, Amanda Li, Edmunda Li, Richard Li, Nicolas Mosaquites, Kyle Pak, Ashley Park and Sarah Ricci, joined the Rosemont speech and debate team since its formation earlier this year.

The team was founded by Miranda Li, junior at CVHS, who also acts as head coach.

“The team was a lot more popular than I expected, so I recruited my varsity CV speech and debate teammates to help me coach the students,” Li said. “Each coach has an event specialty and combined the other coaches and I work together to mentor the Rosemont team and give them all the opportunity to try out and succeed in a wide range of events.”

The members of the CVHS varsity speech and debate team who coach the Rosemont team are Martin Adamian, Adam Aronovsky, Andrew Hong, Armen Karabekyan, Forrest Kim, Miranda Li, Kevin Park, Mark Webster, John Woo and Dylan Yang. The two teams meet every Monday after school for one-and-half hours.

Li said that the partnership between the CVHS and Rosemont speech and debate students is rewarding for both teams. She noted the Rosemont team provides the CVHS varsity speech and debate students a way to “give back to the community [with the] competitive expertise [they’ve] obtained from participating in the speech and debate program.”

“The Rosemont team [also] receives valuable mentoring from CVHS upperclassmen, learning more about not only communication and argumentation skills, but personal stories about the high school experience,” she added.

During the Mustang Invitational Speech and Debate Tournament, Amanda Li placed first in the Congress, Original Oratory, and Original Narrative categories and second in the overall tournament. Stepan Derian and Nick Mosaquites placed third in the Duo Interpretation and Avery Anderson won the Spontaneous Argument category of the competition. Lauren Curtis placed second in the Congress category and Richard Li placed third in the Declamation category and won first place in the overall competition.

The next tournament the Rosemont speech and debate team will be participating in is the 2017 Surf City Express Invitation held on April 29.

  Nicole MOORE