Kudos has a long and storied history of success in competitive speech and debate. But over the past few years we have focused a large portion of our attention on middle school students. Multiple students from last year’s eight grade class decided that they wanted to continue competing with Kudos throughout high school. So for the first time in program history, we have a High School Congress Team!

We started the year by competing at The Jack Howe Invitational hosted by Cal State University Long Beach and the year began with a fantastic start!

Alen Zheng returned to Congress after spending his last year working on impromptu and extemp. He got ranked top six in his 2nd round and overall beat multiple competitors in his chamber despite being one of the only freshmen.

Claire Wen got ranked by five of her six judges including FOUR top six rankings. She was in the toughest of the seven prelim chambers in the tournament as four of the students in her chamber were top 16 overall in the tournament. Despite these obstacles, she was only two ranks away from breaking into the semi finals.

Special congratulations goes out to Fiona Zhou who had the 7th best ranking overall coming out of prelims.

She accomplished this by getting ranked by every single judge, including four 1st place marks. One of those marks came from the parliamentarian who ranks based on all three rounds combined instead of an individual session. She had the second best overall rank in the semifinal (only behind the tournament champion), which she got multiple first places amongst her five semi judges (again including the parliamentarian). Overall, she finaled and took 9TH PLACE in the tournament amongst almost 75 entries. Great start Kudos!

Fiona Zhou Congress: 9th