April 2011 -- Part I

April was such a huge month that I have to do this one in two parts.  This part will be devoted to our journey to Greenville, South Carolina and back for AACS National competition.  It was the highlight of the school year.  Our choric speaking group performed "Casey at the Bat."  We practiced over 40 hours on this 6 minute performance.  So to reward the students and get them to have the mindset of a real baseball game we went to see the Chattanooga Lookouts play the Saturday before we left on our trip.  The students immediately got in the spirit of the game.  Here are two of the drama stars Hunter and Rachel.  They are always ready to eat ice cream and smile for the camera.

In the introduction of our performance we sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," so the group sang it the night of the Lookouts game with added gusto!

I had gotten my hair cut and colored that day and so here I am enjoying the festivities!!  The Lookouts won that night (Casey did not strike out to lose the game) and we were in high spirits to head to nationals.  We loaded our bus on Tuesday morning and made the trek to Greenville.  It is nice that it is a trip that takes about 5 hours with a group.  When I was in high school we would drive all night to get to nationals from Normal, Illinois!

After getting settled into our rooms and getting a good night rest we had to get right to work.  Our choric group performed first on Wednesday morning.  I had the students up early and warming up.  We performed in the Alumni building as usual and so one of our favorite things to do is to practice on the sidewalk outside.  The air was cool that morning and after a few minutes of warmup we were ready!

I love this picture!  Here is the gang, cool, calm, collected and willing to pose for one last picture before the "big game."  We felt the performance went great and we "hit one out of the park"!! 

After choric was finished I dashed across campus with Hunter and Brooklyn who performed their duet act in Performance Hall.  They did a cutting from "Shadowlands," the story of C.S. and Joy Lewis.  They did a great job as did the reader's theater group and the individuals who performed all throughout the day on Wednesday.  I love competing at this level because everyone is awesome!  I was just proud that my students were there and were rising to the level of this type of competition.  It was a great day of pressure and being stretched to their limits.

After the first round of speech competition on Wednesday it has been our tradition to gather around 5:00 p.m. to wait for the results for those who will continue in the competition by qualifying for the final round of competition.  Here is our group anxiously waiting for the final results to be posted on a kiosk in the Fine Arts Building.  It is a tense time, but excitement is in the air.  Finally, the screen blinks and the results start to be visible.  We all cheer as the Reader's Theatre finalists are shown.

Once again we are on the screen for the next category as well.  These are the only two group categories for speech.  Making it to finals in one of them is an accomplishment, but we were only one of two schools that made it to the finals in both group categories. 

We breathed a sigh of relief and headed to dinner.  Our pressure was temporarily on hold as we were able to enjoy the remainder of the evening knowing that we had one more day of intense competition.  Here are the senior speech students dressed up and ready for the evening service.  They have been such a blessing.  This was the 4th national competition for Hunter and the 3rd for most of the girls. 

I don't even have pictures of the remainder of the competition because we had so much to do.  The groups performed perfectly.  I was not disappointed in the least.  Although we did not place in the top three, we were satisfied that we had done our best and had a great time.

I stayed with the girls in the dorm and the college girls had a party for us on our last night.  What a blessing these three girls were.  I told my friends Jon and Kim Dalton (dean of men at BJU) how well we were treated in the dorm and what fine testimonies these girls were.  Friday morning we packed up and headed home.

After all of the pressure the girls enjoyed playing with the toys in the gift shop at Cracker Barrel when we stopped for lunch.

I don't really know what Hunter is doing here, but I thought it was a good final picture of him with his BJU shirt on.  We still had some drama on the way home.  There was a severe accident that shut the interstate down and we sat still for almost an hour.  Then torrential thunderstorms set in as we were pulling in to our school which made unloading a little challenging.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience and memory for all of us.  I always loved everything about AACS national competition when I was in high school, and so I love facilitating my students to have similar memories of great days in high school.  God was good in giving us safety.  It was worth all of the work. 

Well, now you can await April 2011 -- Part II (to be cont.)