The Haines High School Drama, Debate and Forensics team won titles in two events at the state competition in Anchorage last weekend.
Senior Chris Bowman was the overall winner in speaker points in public forum debate, and he joined junior Cassie Galasso and sophomores Royal Henderson and Brennon Whitermore on the state champion readers’ theater team that excerpted the movie “Airplane!”
Those performances led Haines’ 10-member team to an overall, third-place finish in 3A, trailing Whitestone and Sitka. The Haines champions, though, beat students from all schools, including ones from the 4A class with the state’s largest enrollments.
At state, students compete without regard to school size, but at the end of th tournament, schools are ranked by enrollment class, said Haines coach Gershon Cohen. “When you’re actually in competition and to get into the finals, you have to compete against everyone.”
The Haines team also included senior Sung Heywood, juniors Esther Bower and Elena Horner, sophomore Tia Heywood, and freshmen Zeke Frank and Isobel Smith.
Cohen said the state competition allows as many as 15 participants per team.
“At state, you’re only allowed to do three events, and normally some of our kids are doing four events at our regional tournaments, and that’s why we can do so well regionally and we aren’t hurt by the fact that we have a smaller team, sometimes,” he said.
Bowman and partner Bower debated whether WikiLeaks is a threat to national security. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has posted secret documents online.
“On the negative, there was just the argument that no real harm had come from it yet and looking at the potential good that could come from having a more transparent system,” Bowman said. “I think the strongest point on the other side, on the affirmative of the resolution, is that there’s no one really monitoring WikiLeaks to make sure that what they’re posting is accurate.”
Bowman, the son of Russ Bowman and Karen Meizner, was the runner-up in speaker points last year.
“I’ve been told that (my strengths are) just connecting with the judge and the people who are there in the audience and bringing the debate down to a level where it’s not so esoteric,” he said. “It’s connecting with the people who are in the room and really being a persuasive speaker.”
Bowman is undecided on his college destination, and he would like to continue with debate.
Bowman, Galasso, Henderson and Whitermore put together their best version of “Airplane!” for the win in Anchorage, Cohen said.
“They blew everybody out in the final,” he said. “They had a crowd absolutely in stitches. It was twice as good a performance as they have ever done on the piece. They amazed us.”
“Airplane!” also was a hit at the annual Haines tournament in October, when Henderson announced he would be portraying “everyone else who gets hurt or dies.”
Horner earned an encore, command performance for her third-place solo acting piece, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”
In expository speaking, Tia Heywood placed fifth with a speech on the effects of sleep loss.
Haines also earned a sportsmanship award.
Cohen said he will work to encourage more participation in DDF. He noted Haines had entrants in nine of the 14 events at state and “we have 10 percent of the school that is in the program, and they have to cover a lot of bases.”
“We’re going to do some more outreach into the middle school before next season, to start kind of doing what the basketball team does to make sure we have more kids in the pipe, so that we can take our maximum number in future years,” he said.