Time Crunch

In the last post, I attached a picture of one of the teams I have been on this semester.

I have been on three teams so far, and I am up for a spot on a fourth later this semester. We restack teams to ensure we have the best people in the top positions. By the end of the year, we try to construct our “A team” of our best members.

Team Pascal was unstacked, teams were picked for fun, not competitive success. Up next is our pre-stacked teams. There were five teams I could have been on, Team Aag and Team Fuego were for higher scoring members while the other three were for lower ranking members.

Much to my surprise, as I have been doing Mock Trial for mere months, I was placed on Team Fuego. Even more surprising, immediately after finding out I made the team, I was told we had four days before we competed.

It took us a month to finish preparing our case for Team Pascal. We had to prepare everything in just four days!?

When I walked into my first Team Fuego practice, I met my new team members. We were all excited that we made the team, but the time crunch was killing the vibe.

Luckily, I was able to keep playing the same witness I played on Team Pascal. One of Pascal’s captains, Dan, spoke to my new captains about my portrayal of Maddox Vaughn. He thought I did a great job with it and suggested that I keep my part.

My new captains agreed and had me keep my role the same. This made my life so much easier as I just had to adapt my work, not create something new.

After our first meeting, we decided our defense theory. We were going to blame the fire on Skylar De Jong, an employee the defendant fired.

This was a fun theory to run as it required an alternative suspect. One of my teammates, Evan, played Skylar. He got to go on the stand and make himself seem as guilty as he could without flat out admitting to the fire. Unfortunately but understandably, there are rules against that. It would make the job of the defense much easier to have a witness admit to the crimes of the defendant.

Evan had also played this witness before, so he already knew what he was doing. We were able to patch our roles from our prior teams together to create a case we would know.

The four days passed and we were stressed. We got into our cars and started driving to Boston. On the ride there, we were still writing parts of our case! Even in the face of so much pressure, we still managed to have a good time! If I had to summarize the trip, I would say it was half stressful and half enjoyable.

The actual competition went a lot better than we expected it to. When we got to the awards ceremony, we were all on the edges of our seats. Did our five day old team actually score well?

Somehow we did. We left with a record of five wins, 2 losses and one tie. We got third place overall at the tournament! All of that stress was worth it!