The Free State forensics team has been state champions for the past four straight years. With their season fast approaching, students work to prepare for another hopefully successful year.

Some ways that students prepare are by using the off-season and debate season to prep and cut pieces. They also use the weeks before the first tournament to tidy up speeches that they will perform.

“Right now I’m working on memorization, adding in blocking and getting that base layer set. So then I can add in the more nitty gritty details,” senior Liz Wyle said.

After years of winning, some students like Wyle feel the pressure to recreate their success and do not want to end the legacy. Senior Connor Brown can also see that the other schools have noticed their success.

“Other schools definitely expect us to be good. So we want to raise their expectations of what they have to use,” Brown said.

With an ever-changing team, coaches and upperclassmen have to adapt to new members. The team works to try to blend novices into the team while continually working with the returning members.

“We have the coaching staff and people who have done this before who are really good at integrating them and making them feel like part of the community,” junior Kaitlynn Sedich said.

Impressively, the team has been able to successfully adapt over the last couple of years, and expectations for this year are no different. Some members of last year’s winning team are back, and a new crop of novices are ready to go.

“This year we have some really competitive novices. I’m super excited to get to know their personalities more,” Sedich said. “We also have a lot of returning champions. So I think that the team’s successes in the past are going to carry through this year.”