First Round of Competitions – The Night that was

My fellow toastmasters,

What a night of competitions we had; full of excitement, adventure and what I’ve chosen to label ‘champagne toastmastery’.

A relatively sparse crowd gathered to help us cheer on the two competitions of the night: table topics and evaluations.

Our chief judge was Philip Battey from City Center club who was well supported by fellow judges: Allan Gowers, Amellia Xie and Chamila Senadipathy (also from City Center).

Kumar stepped up to the podium as chairperson of the evening and did a magnificent job that will be tough to match at the next meeting.

The table topic for the night was ‘I arrived at the top of the mountain and realized … ‘ which was generally acknowledged to be a tricky one by all involved.

That said, we received varied eloquent and intelligent responses from each of our contestants making it a real challenge for the judges to pick a winner from the quality.

Contestents on the night were (in no particular order):

i) Robert Horvath
ii) Jonathan Scheele
iii) Ross Turetsky, CC
iv) Ken Brandt

Ross took first honors in what, as I said, was a close competition (well done Ross 🙂

Our evaluation competition continued to drench us in a veritable ocean of quality speechafying

Ken Brandt bowed out of the comp. in favour of delivering a fascinating test speech that gave us all an insight into the machinations of the
American electoral process.

Our remaining contestants (Robert, Jonathan and Ross from above) made it a double header.

Ross took first colors once again despite a strong field (which chief judge Phil made a point of indicating reflected well upon our entire club).

Once again, well done Ross.

Ross and well … Ross will now (barring sudden default) go onto represent our club at the area level, I’m sure we all wish him the best of luck.

My only real regret of the night was that more of you weren’t there to enjoy it.

I always have a great time on competition night, a great way to enjoy a night of toastmastery while experiencing another side of what club membership has to offer.

We’ve another set of competitions in a fortnights time, I urge all of you to take advantage of the opportunity and come along to see what club competitions can really
be about.

Happy Trails,

Ben Maslen.