UIL journalism team competed in the Central Texas ILPC Invitational Meet Friday, Dec. 6 through Dec. 7. First through 10th places were awarded Saturday, Dec. 7.

”I feel really good about how we did in UIL this year,” junior Rachel Oliver said. “We’ve done better than we’ve ever done before in a UIL competition. Everyone who competed placed, which is a big accomplishment for our staff since we have an all-new newspaper staff save one person.”

The students received medals, ribbons, and papers on Tuesday, Dec. 10 in recognition of their performance. 

“I felt like it went really well,” Henningsen said. “We all did really well, especially for all the new people that had never competed before. I think they did really well considering that they had barely just learned the format of their event. We all placed really well, so it just goes to show that even though we’re writing well and writing good stories, it’s nice to have the numbers to show that we actually are writing good stories compared to other schools in the district. 

After getting the results back, the UIL journalism team placed first through 6th for Copy Editing, Feature, Headline, and News. 

“To be completely honest I didn’t feel that confident in what I submitted for my [feature] writing piece,” junior Sloane Diamond said. “I was glad that I got the practice in so I could do better in the future event. I didn’t think that I would get very far in this virtual meet, so I was so surprised when the results came in.”

Senior Ainsley Shaw placed first in Headline Writing. Junior Mckenzie Henningsen placed second in Copy Editing, and Oliver placed fourth. Oliver also placed third in News competing with junior Jharna Kamath who placed fifth and freshman Jacqueline Ekman placed first. Also, in Feature Writing, junior Sloane Diamond placed fifth and Henningsen placed sixth. 

“Since it was my first time competing I was really nervous and I did not think I was going to place at all,” Shaw said. “It was really shocking to hear that I placed first if anything. I was just very proud of myself and the entire staff.”

Each student was given a specific time for their entries. The News and Editorial contests were given 45-minutes, the Feature contest was one hour, Copy Editing received 15 minutes, and Headline was 30 minutes. 

“At first when she said that [news writing] would only be 45 minutes, I was kind of worried,” Kamath said. ”Usually the whole process of writing a story has always taken me longer than 45 minutes, but then when I actually did it all of the interviews were already there and it didn’t seem as overwhelming as I thought it would be. It felt more like putting a puzzle together than actually trying to find interviews and find people and track them down, so it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”