Music played as the team marched onto the stage, minutes away from securing their second place spot in the annual All Writes Reserved competition. On May 6, the Millard South poetry team defied odds and won second place in their most complicated season so far.

The slam team almost assumed they were finished when their teacher sponsor left halfway through the year.

“This season has been really different because we lost Joe, our past coach, and then we lost Mrs. Wormington, so we lost a classroom and a teacher sponsor,” says Magnolia Moriarty. “And then we also lost a bunch of people, so we had to scramble to find new coaches, find a new teacher sponsor, and make a team,” Moriarty said. 

A lesser team may have fallen apart, but for the senior members, this season meant far too much to stop.

“When Mrs. Wormington left, everyone was in such a field of uncertainty, and we just rose together as a team,” senior member Alexi Nielsen said. “We really bonded through extra meetings and put in so much work, and we really built our bonds as a team,” she said.

The season was also helped by the stepping in of social studies teacher Kristy McGuire.

“McGuire was the best,” says Raven Cranny, “She really stepped up and let us use her room, and she gave us a really unique perspective that we wouldn’t have gotten from a typical source.”

McGuire primarily became the new teacher sponsor for two reasons.

“Raven invited me to last year’s semi finals because I taught him in AP human Geography, and I was fascinated,” McGuire said. “I had never been. It was awesome!” The other reason? One of the new coaches was a past student of McGuire’s.

“Sam Facebook messaged me, and I know Sam from having him as a former student, and I was happy to do it,” McGuire said. “It was really cool to see the behind the scenes, the modifying and tweaking the kids do to their pieces. I want to come next year when I’m retired,” she said.

Furthermore, the two new coaches helped shake things up for the team.

“Our new coaches have focused really well,” Moriarty said. “They’ve focused on writing and workshopping and sticking to pieces and getting them solid and performance ready, so that’s really helped,” Moriarty said. The team’s past coach, Joe, left the All Writes Reserved program the team runs through.

The process of a slam season is an interesting one.

“We spend the first semester writing pieces, that’s really the creative side of it,” explains Cranny. “And then the second semester we pick our pieces and workshop, we make changes and cuts and memorize our pieces. We also have to get the performance to under 3 minutes, because after that you start taking point penalties. And in our group pieces, timing is of the essence.”

Pieces can be about anything the student wants to write about. The All Rights Reserved competition is run by the Nebraska Writers Collective, and is meant to encourage self expression in students. Each poem is performed in front of an audience and then scored by five judges, who rank it on a scale from 0-10. A 10 is a perfect score, and they get rarer and rarer throughout the year. The highest and lowest scores are both dropped, before the remaining 3 are averaged out. Teams across Nebraska compete to make it to finals.  The competition starts with each team going through two preliminary rounds against three other teams. After preliminary rounds, the highest scoring 16 teams face off in four separate semifinals, where only the first place winner of each moves on. Finally, the four top scoring teams go head to head at Finals, held at the Holland center this year. Millard South landed in second place behind Norfolk.

Pieces can be written about any topic.

“My piece was called ‘a letter to the strays I pick up’ and it’s an allegory for seasonal depression,” Moriarty said. “My piece is called ‘Siren Song Amongst Petrichor.’ “It’s about Nebraska weather, and it is a duet- and with that, I’m not just writing for myself, I’m writing for my friend Jo,” Cranny said. Jo Hendrickson, the other member of the duet, confirms this.

“On one hand, it is much easier when remembering lines because you can kinda go off of your partner but on the other hand, it’s really difficult to time everything properly to make it sound in sync.” The other two pieces were senior Shelby Neeley’s “This Poem Isn’t About You” and Nielsen’s “American arts Inferno,” about grief and censorship respectively.

A slam typically ends with each team doing a group piece. This year’s piece was called “I Wasn’t There” and dealt with the aftermath of a school shooting, specifically on teachers many years later.

“It was so meaningful to me,” McGuire said. “The first time I heard them practice in the lecture hall I teared up, because I was there.”