The St. Vincent Grammar School retained the coveted Sir Arthur Connell Challenge trophy last Thursday, October 21, at the Methodist Church Hall in the 2010 edition of the LIME/Lions Club South Secondary Schools Public Speaking Competition.{{more}}

Chezual Walker beat Jemmel Williams of the Georgetown Secondary and Rolien Nedd of the St. Joseph’s Convent Kingstown into second and third spots respectively.

It was a clean sweep for the St.Vincent Grammar School as Walker took the top award for the best speech in the main and student-prepared speech as well as the impromptu category.

“I feel elated that I was able to do what I did tonight,” Williams told SEARCHLIGHT.

The fifth form student was modest as he further explained that he did not think that he would have performed as well as he did.

“But I guess the judges thought otherwise. I’m glad that they thought that and I was able to do so well,” he continued.

While there may have been some additional pressure to return the trophy to his school, Walker said that he was hardly affected and used the pressure as motivation to perform well.

Frank Jones, Principal of the St.Vincent Grammar School, said that he was proud of his student and of the staff at the English department at the school.

Jones added that he had a lot of confidence in Walker to bring the trophy back to Grammar School based on his performance in the preliminaries.

Discussing the topic ‘Is justice an elusive concept in St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ three performances stood out, Walker of the St.Vincent Grammar School, Williams of the Georgetown and Lisa Hussein of the West St. George Secondary.

The trio of Walker, Williams and Hussein were the clear crowd favourites after the students’ prepared topic category.

Williams’ second place finish was not bad as he had to overcome some miscommunication issues relating to the main topic.

Just before delivering his first speech Williams said that he had originally prepared a speech using ‘illusive’ as opposed to ‘elusive’.

West St.George’s Hussein had good diction and presented a well researched paper, but may have been guilty of reading from her speech.

She also fell short in the impromptu category.

The St. Joseph’s Convent Kingstown, Rolien Nedd, impressed in the students’ prepared topic category as she gave the audience a view of the country with a female prime minister, the first, at the helm.

The impromptu category presented some problems for the majority of the six finalists with only Walker, Williams and Lisa Lanferman of the Girls’ High School performing satisfactorily. (DD)