The IHS JustWrite team won the Grand Champion award for the second time at the Cloverleaf Regional Tournament on Saturday, January 17.
Writers competed in Division One (D1) for underclassmen and Division Two (D2) for upperclassmen. The competitors split into different rooms for three different rounds, in which they were assigned a genre and a prompt and were given 45 minutes to write a story.
“It’s difficult because we need to keep in mind story structure, thematic development, genre qualities and what our judges want to see,” junior Robby Kalman commented. The judges awarded each story a certain amount of quality points, which would determine its score. The IHS team accumulated the most points out of all 40 schools, winning Grand Champion.
Not only did IHS score well, but the team grew significantly as writers. JustWrite coach Mrs. Jill Wagner hopes the writers take away “a positive attitude toward competitive creative writing as a sport, [and] the value of having a unique, authentic voice when inventing a storyline.”
An important aspect of the tournament was “bringing forth new ideas and creative interpretations to the prompts,” senior Matthew Liepert said.
“I think the most important takeaway is to have fun and to write from the heart,” senior Mes Sheehan commented. “Letting your creativity flow and having fun is more important than winning.”
Senior Tatiana Randjelovic’s favorite part was winning Grand Champion. “It was such a great feeling because there was definitely a sense of community involved where we all had our achievement; we all had something special and we all came together with it.”
The IHS D1 team won second overall and the D2 team won first overall. Sophomore Adriana Randjelovic placed ninth overall in D1. In D2, Liepert placed fifteenth, Kalman placed thirteenth, and Sheehan placed fifth. Tatiana Randjelovic won the second place poetry award.
The IHS JustWrite team will advance to the state tournament at Bluffton University on May 18, where they will compete against talented writers and, if they score high enough, see their stories featured in the JustWrite Anthology, A Collection of Voices.
