After placing second at the Regional Tournament, my team an I knew there were definitely some key elements we could revise for the provincial tournament. If competing in Destination Imagination has taught me one thing, it is that there is alway room for improvement. Going into the provincial tournament our team had one thing on our mind and that was to improve.
We knew that it would be a good idea to advance our story so that the appraisers could give us a higher score. Our container did not score highly in tits relation ship to the story. By this time, I knew my lines, and all I had left to do was help other group members with the improvements.
The one aspect of the presentation that didn’t need improvement was the game gizmo/technical element. We scored very high in this aspect of our presentation at the regional tournament, (pat on the back), and we knew that our work was better used somewhere else. In class we made a burn chart to help us get all of our work done on time. This was very helpful full, because we could edit the graph individually.
Unfortunately, a week before the presentation we got some terrible news. One of our team members,(Jessie), could not attend due to a conflicting work schedule. she was our lead actress, and had been our driving force ever since day one. To help soften the blow, we transferred most of our work on to the story, and two team choice elements. Marshall really stepped up and took her place in the story, this included all of here lines. By friday we had everything under control, but to really add the finishing touches on to our presentation we had to stay after school for another three hours. We were finally ready for the big prefomance.
When we got to the Provincial Tournament, we moved our props and backdrop to the correct hosing area, and started practicing right away. Our performance for our central challenge started at nine twenty so we had only thirty minutes to practice. When it got to that time, we grabbed all of our props, and headed over to the presentation area. Our presentation ran way better than I expected, and the appraisers really seemed to like it. There were a few lines mixed up, but that was kind of expected since some people only had a day to memorize.
Since I had my lines dialed in, I was always there to help the presentation run smoothly. Our instant challenge was at eleven forty, so wee had some time in between to watch other presentations. After our instant challenge our team ‘Chilled’ in the chill out room. One of our group members left before the rest, probably because we were playing Minecraft remix songs. We all finally got up off of the incredibly comfortable bean bag chairs and headed downstairs to see some of our classmates preform.
My friends and I sat down and got ready to see the prefomance. All of a sudden, one of the grade niners, leaned over their chair and said the worst seven words I have ever heard in all of my DI experience. “ You know you might be disqualified.” Honestly, it didn’t even hit me until the next day what had happened. Our Instant Challenge Manager had over heard one of our team members talking to another team about the instant challenge. This its self was disqualification material, but to make it all worse, apparently, when confronted both of our teams were rude and causal about what had happened.
When I finally got the whole story, I was speechless. Every year I have competed in DI, I have walked home coming in sixth or seventh place. I thought this was going to be the year, were we came in first or second and got to go up and collect the trophy from the appraisers. There was only two teams competing in our division so the worst we could come was second, or so I thought. That Sunday after Destination Imagination, I honestly didn’t feel like myself. I had committed weeks and weeks to DI and had nothing to show for it. I don’t even know if we would have won in our division, but any thing was better than what had happened. Even though, I learned a tremendous amount from participating in DI all of these years my experiences were not close to perfection. It really was a shame it had to end this way.