Our students have embarked on a true gauntlet of tournaments throughout the month of February. Despite the challenges of remote learning and competition, a select few students took on the challenge of taking on Stanford, Harvard, and the Los Angeles SCFJL League tournament this month. This is the first update of the month.

Stanford has and always will be a grueling tournament with competitors from across the country and, keeping in tradition, remains one of the largest tournaments in the country. Despite bringing relatively few students to the competition, our students competed fierce and braved the horrors of 12 hour competition days and absent minded judges that input the wrong data. Regardless, we saw our own Sarah Chen advance to Double Octofinals in LD and Ryan Wong and William Pan advance to Double Octofinals from triple octos!

The Public Forum section had 176 entries and with over 300 students involved, William Pan was the 69th place speaker with Pearl Hsieh not too far behind at 78th!
Out of 88 students, Sarah Chen was 18th place speaker with Katherine Kligys not too far behind at 25th.

After Stanford, our students competed in the harrowing 47th Annual Harvard Forensics Tournament and I must tell you that this is the, if not one of the, largest tournaments in the country (if not the world)!
In PF, all divisions combined, there were over 600 students competing and in LD practically 300! Students from around the world were competing, from New York to Taiwan to Beijing!
Our students had to wake up before 6am in order to get ready for the tournament and they competed very well under the circumstances.
In PF, we unfortunately did not have any students advance to the break rounds and it may have been due to their only being 5 preliminary rounds instead of the normal 6 for a tournament that size. When there are 6 rounds, a typical ’4 wins and you’re pretty much in’ is the paradigm, but with only 5, the standard to break becomes much more intense.

Our PF teams took this in stride and still competed very admirably against some of the most talented students from around the world for what shaped up to be a pretty great experience!On the LD side of things, our students had to endure 7 preliminary rounds which resulted in two of our students, Annie Jiang and Sarah Chen, advancing to Triple-Octofinals, meaning they were already in the top 64 of an almost 300 student size pool.

While Annie would unfortunately not advance, Sarah would continue to win all the way to the semi-finals of the tournament, placing her in the top 4 / 300! Despite our LD students going against middle school and high school students, they still brought forth immense effort and passion for the activity.

On to Congress, Kudos sent 11 students to both of the most prestigious tournaments in the country. Not only did these students go against the toughest competition nationwide, but they did so in back to back weekends. At both tournaments at least 35 percent of the team broke to semi finals, as well as three finalists in each competition.

Three of the top 12 finalists in each tournament tied for the most amount of finalists from one program at both competitions individually.

At Stanford, Zachary Chang made semifinals for the second year in a row. Claire Wen finaled and took 12th, Lindsey Jiang took 6th and Fiona Zhao took 4th. Shout outs to 8th graders Bena Feng and Veronica Shao for being next out from making Semifinals. Special praise goes to first year speech student Emily Yang who went up against HIGH schoolers in impromptu and took top half in the tournament in terms of speaker points.

Back in congress, Lindsey, Fiona, Zach and Claire built off that progress from Stanford and were the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 7th seeds coming out of prelims at Harvard. At this tournament SEVEN of our competitors broke, which was more than any other program in the WORLD.

First year members Anne Liu, Evelyn Lam made semis as well as Serena Guo and Claire Wen. Fiona and Claire closed out as top two in their prelim chamber, with Zach and Lindsey taking 1st in their individual prelim chambers. Then, Zach, Fiona and Lindsey made finals, while all taking the top half in the final round by getting 6th, 4th, and 3rd respectively.

Kudos was the only program to have 3 of the top half of the competitors in the final round. Shoutouts once more to Bena Feng and Veronica Shao for again being next out from making semifinals. Final congratulations are deserved to Fiona for winning the leadership award in her prelim chamber, and Lindsey for winning the leadership award in her semifinal chamber.

Kudos enjoys a relaxing week off this weekend before heading to SCJFL 3 next week. We are so proud of the tremendous accomplishments they have earned this month and we are excited to see the progress they make throughout the rest of the year. Way to kick off the second semester with a bang!

Finalist in Congress Debate, with coach Mr. Feldman