High school students compete in UIL events

Amarillo College hosted the University Interscholastic League’s competition for District 7-1A last Friday.

Students from high schools in Canadian, Claude, Gruver, Shamrock, Stinnett, Sunray, Wheeler and White Deer participated in the day-long competition.

“About 75 – possibly more – students are here competing,” said Chris Parks, a speech and theater teacher at Canadian High School and district academic meet director.

According to the organization’s Web site, UIL is a voluntary-membership, non-profit organization that exists to provide educational extracurricular academic, athletic and music contests with the purpose of providing preparatory educational activities for students. It is the largest inter-school organization of its kind and is unique to Texas.

“Each spring, one or two districts ask us to coordinate an academic contest,” said Jill Gibson, a speech and mass communication assistant professor. “AC arranges all of the rooms and finds judges for all of the individual contest events that require judging.”

Friday’s event was centered in the Byrd Business Building, with several contests taking place in Ordway Hall. Gibson, who has coordinated UIL meets at AC for six years, noted that events typically are scheduled on days when fewer classes are in session in order to minimize the disturbance.

Included among the numerous contests that took place were newswriting, prose and debate. All the events are designed by the UIL with the goal of correlating to existing academic curricula and motivating students to attain a higher level of skills beyond the classroom. “A lot of the students take it pretty seriously” Gibson said.

The contests were judged by volunteers who consisted mainly of current and retired AC faculty. Lynae Jacob, an assistant professor of speech, has judged UIL contests for eight years.

“I like the prose contests,” Jacob said. “I love hearing a good story be told.”

The UIL events offer multiple benefits. Students are given a chance to participate in skill-strengthening events within a college environment.

Also present is the opportunity for AC faculty to network with the teachers, counselors and principals of the schools that make up District 7-1A.

“UIL is important to me because it exposes the high school students from smaller towns to college,” Jacob said. “I participated in UIL events when I was in high school, and it definitely influenced me.”

• Facebook Comments
• Site Comments

Be the first to comment on this article!

Add comment


I am not posting spam. I understand posting spam or other comments that are unrelated to this article will cause my comment to be flagged for deletion and possibly cause my IP address to be permanently banned from this server.

Enter the characters in the image above:

log out