Third Place after starting  with a 3-man team and a serious broken leg (but more on that later).

Junior Theatresports this year faced several challenges such as beginning with a 3-man team and a serious broken leg (but more on that later).

2016 was a fresh start for Junior Theatresports as all but one of 2015’s team members had moved up to the senior grade. Towards the start of the year the potential junior team consisted of Joseph Robinson (a 2016 newcomer to Theatresports), Daniel Fogarty (an old hand more or less) and me. I was the only one team who had taken part in a competition as I was the 6th member of the team last year. Joe caught on extremely quickly with the seniors there for guidance. It was only the beginning of the year and the priority lay with the seniors as their competition was before ours. So we sat every lunch time and watched how they performed... silently taking note of their techniques (in between playing our own games of course).

As the year raced on we began to become just a tad worried as we still had a team of only three members which is a Theatresports minimum. We tried the games as best we could with only three players but some were more of a challenge than others (Poem above all). Then Joseph severely broke his leg (at Mega Jump) and for a time this limited what we could do for at times he wasn’t even at school to practise. About a month or so away from the heat it seemed we had been blessed with a miracle when we found out that a good friend Toby McManus would be able to join our team. He attended Unlimited (or Ao Tawhiti) and this meant he could take time out of school to come and practise with us. We were ecstatic as this meant we could experiment more and play games we had never dared with only three (or two people).

After only two full practices with Toby we had only one week before our heat would take place. Thankfully we were able to have Thursday and Friday of that week to practise, to make up for lost time. We spent this time refining our games till we had come up with our two choices: English Gibberish Switch and Actor’s Nightmare (two games we felt quite confident with).

The day had finally come and the 27th of November had arrived. We showed up at Heaton confident and prepared (as much as you can be for an improvised tournament), ready to perform. The teams in our heat were: Hillview Christian School, Geraldine High and Hornby High. For our blind round game we went last and were given a Shared Story based around the title: The Beautiful Fox. The score for this was a 7/10. We were coming second as we approached the three minute round. The game we had chosen for this was English Gibberish Switch, and after a fairly chaotic scene we were given an 8/10. Last but not least was the narrative/4minute round in which we chose to play Actor’s Nightmare (which by far was one of the favourite scenes I’ve done all year). Sadly, although we scored 8/10 once again others did better and we finished 3rd place overall with Geraldine making it to the finals. I believe that was it was an extremely fun year for Theatresports at STC and I look forward to continuing on into Year 10 (where maybe we have better luck).

Cormac Gallagher