Senior Anna Dick has been apart of the Forensics team since her freshmen year. During her eighth grade One Act, Forensics coach Bradley Walton saw her work ethic and decided to recruit her. At this time Walton was writing One Act plays for the middle schools. He went to the Virginia Theater Association Middle School One Act Festival, that was hosted at Skyline, to see if his pieces were accommodating to his targeted audience. While he found out that he was, he also found Dick.

“Anna was in eighth grade doing backstage stuff and she was working her butt off. It was obvious that she was working her butt off and it was obvious that she was competent. She was competently working her butt off. That kind of thing makes a good impression and I knew that I was going to need a new stage manager to run things back stage for the following year. My stage manager was going to soon be graduating and that’s a very important position, so I recruited Anna to be stage manager for Spring Play,” Walton said. From there, Walton encouraged Dick to join Forensics.

“She was also in the cast at the Skyline play and I thought she had a very solid stage presence,” Walton said. The main thing Dick likes about Forensics is how it is like theater.

“I liked the fact that it was kinda like theater, but also it was also competition and I’m not real big into like sporting things so it was kinda a way for me to part of a team as well and I liked that because you form a real bond with your team mates,” Dick said.

This year, Dick is performing in Walton’s play “Revenge of Rainbow Sheep” for her category Prose and Interpretations. She plays a sheep that isn’t black or white, but is rainbow. Rainbow Sheep is neglected by society but later on in the play Rainbow Sheep is in a lab to make a koala and Rainbow Sheep hybrid. Then some of Rainbow Sheep’s orange wool and the koala DNA spill on her and she gains superpowers; the ability to shoot rainbows out of her Ba’s and she can fly. Instead of using these powers for good, she uses them for evil as a way to get her revenge.

Earlier in the season, Dick was performing “I’m Stuck in a Round of Serious Dramatic Interpretation and I Really Have to Pee” but due to some complications with line memorizing Dick switched her piece just three weeks before her Forensics conference.

With Forensics, a student will perform the same piece over the course of a competition. As a student moves forward in the competition they work on perfecting their piece each time. Dick hasn’t needed much perfecting in her piece.

“Anna is very good at this. She was a state finalist last year, in the prose interpretation category. The piece she was originally doing at the beginning of the year was a humorous dramatic interpretation and when we switched she went back to prose interpretations, which was the same thing that she did last year. So she was back to working with something that she was very well practiced. Her initial practice, which was a few weeks before practice, was good and I’m not going to say that there is a huge spike in equality from where we were six weeks ago because she was already really good to begin with. Yes, she has improved and it is more fine tuned, but most of her improvement and skill building as occurred in previous years,” Walton said. Currently Dick is worrying about the competition that she is to face at States.

“I’m nervous. I don’t really know how it is going to go. Competition is going to be rough because the schools are so good,” Dick said.