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2020 Wheeling Park High School Speech Team Finally Gets Its Due

photo by: Photo by Joselyn King

A plaque honoring the seniors on the 2020 Wheeling Park High School speech team now sits in a display case at the school alongside other speech team trophies.

The Wheeling Park High School speech team may have won 42 consecutive state championships since 1979, but until recently there was a blank spot on the wall where recognition of the 2020 team would have been.

That team never got to participate in the state championships in March 2020.. They were prepared to go to Morgantown and West Virginia University to compete, only to have the state tournament canceled just days before due to the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Now a plaque has been placed honoring the seniors on that team and their captains, Lydia Bischof, Marian Moss and Laura Tighe.

Coach Bill Cornforth remembers the day in March 2020 before they were to leave for the state finals that he stood before them, giving them a pep talk to prepare them for the upcoming competition.

In the middle of his speech, his phone rang. He received a message that Gov. Jim Justice had just canceled all public and school activities in the state – the speech tournament among them.

photo by: Photo by Joselyn King

The 2020 Wheeling Park High School speech team missed its place on the winners walld due to COVID shutting down the state tournament that year.

“I was speaking with them to enthuse them on, and it got interrupted just like that,” Cornforth said. “I had to switch and tell them the tournament was off.

“We didn’t know then if we could do it later. As it turned out, we couldn’t. Things they were working for for months were taken away at the snap of a finger. It was just like that.”

The effort to later recognize the group began when Moss’s grandmother, Joann Davis, was examining the wall adjacent to the Beneke Theater at WPHS. It is there that each of the team’s championships is noted.

She realized the 2020 team members were going unrecognized through no fault of their own.

“They missed everything – their tournament … their banquet,” Davis said. “They missed everything that year.”

photo by: Photo by Joselyn King

A plaque honoring the seniors on the 2020 Wheeling Park High School speech team now sits in a display case at the school alongside other speech team trophies.

She said she spoke to Cornforth to see if something could be done to include the 2020 team among the honorees. Davis said Cornforth told her he would discuss it with his other coaches, and from there the matter would need to go before WPHS administrators and ultimately the Ohio County Schools central office.

In the end, it was determined a plaque with the seniors’ names on it was appropriate, and it has been placed in the display case next to the wall alongside the team’s numerous trophies.

“To the speech and debate seniors of 2020, you will always be number one in our hearts,” the plaque reads. It lists the names of all the seniors on the team – Teresa Albert-Siebieda, Logan Annett, Bischof, Jillian Blair,Tori Blanton, Lydia Kellas, Adam Marquart, Moss, Luke Oschenbein, Daisy Reasbeck, Tighe, Veda Wheeler, Paige Williams and Natalya Wood

“It made me cry,” Davis said. “I do feel the students were deserving of the recognition. They worked harder than anyone realizes. They work all summer long. I’ve watched them. I know.”

She said she was one of many grandparents and parents who felt for the team’s collective loss.

“We were so sad they missed so much,” Davis said.

Cornforth termed the 2020 seniors on the speech team “a very talented experienced group.”

“There were a lot of homerun hitters on the team,” he said. “Some had been to the national tournament the year before and done well.

“They were very motivated in their research, and in the number of practices they would do. They were a very talented group.”

He suspects all of them would have won awards at the state tournament, and that a number of them would have qualified for the national tournament.

“But they were given an opportunity for great maturity,” Cornforth continued. “They were dealt a blow. But in life, you are dealt blows. And the blows you are dealt are often more difficult than what they had to deal with.

“This was good training in humility and inner strength that will prepare them for life’s harder blows,” Cornforth said.

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