The team will travel to two national competitions in April.
Ball State’s Speech Team took first place in 17 out of 20 categories as well as the Quality Award at the Indiana Forensics Association State Tournament at the University of Indianapolis Feb. 18.
Ball State has won the competition for the past nine out of 10 years.
Coach Mary Moore said the team goes to the state competition every year, and last year was the first year the team also won 17 awards.
“We were the favorite going in … we were really surprised, though, to win 17," Moore said. "To do that two years in a row, I think really speaks to the students’ commitment to the team and how hard they work.”
Moore said these wins gave her team momentum and an emotional boost in their postseason. Eleven members won a state champion title in at least one category.
“It was a chance to showcase the breadth of our team," she said. "We’ve had different teams that we’d captured the state title [with] but it’s been really dependent on a few stars. But this current team … we have a lot of talent and skill and really impressive events across the board."
Dayna Arnett, a senior biochemistry and pre-medicine major, won three state champion awards and placed second to her own teammates in her other two events. Arnett has won in the persuasion category each year she has entered in the category.
“Persuasion's always been kind of my love child, because I did an event like that in high school called original oratory, so I got to continue that as I did college speech,” Arnett said. “I get to use a skill that I’ve been crafting for so long to be able to talk to people about something I really care about.”
Arnett’s persuasion speech this year was on maternal mortality for African-American women in the United States, which is rising throughout the country and is three to four times higher for African-American women than other races.
“[Winning] is nuts," she said. "I saw more success than I could ever dream of at that tournament. It isn’t even about me; it’s about seeing my team do that well and how many awards that everybody else on the team was able to take. That makes me really proud not only as the co-captain of the team but as a teammate and a friend."
Marissa Lockhart, a freshman creative writing major, won two state titles and three second place awards. Before Ball State, Lockhart had never been involved in speech.
“[Winning] was just really enlightening and made me super proud of not only my team, but of myself and my own performance and [it] proved to myself that I can do this and no matter if I had the experience before or not, the speech team is a family and they really helped me get to where I needed to be," Lockhart said. "The whole moment, that tournament was just a really good moment to realize how important this team is."
Cade Heaton, a sophomore political science and philosophy major, and Riley Poynter, a sophomore public relations major, won a state championship award for improv duo. The duo competed in three rounds, and the competition was the first time the duo had performed the event together and was Heaton’s first improv duo ever.
“There’s a natural kind of synergy between Riley and me when it comes to that kind of thing. It’s very easy just [for] him to say something and then I can just roll with that or that I can say something and he can roll with it," Heaton said. "You never get those stall-outs where the narrative kind of falls apart.”
Poynter said the three minutes teams are given to prepare before their six-minute performance contains a lot of panic, because they have a small amount of time to put themselves out there and impress the judges.
“We kind of thought about general things like OK, we’ll play these kind of characters, this’ll be how we’ll start, this will be how we end it, and then everything in the middle was kind of fair game,” Poynter said. “It’s like turning a rough draft in as your final.”
The team will travel to two national competitions in April.
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