How mock trial shaped me today
Seniors Aakash Hazari and Brian Graham earned Lifetime Achievement Awards on March 5.
April 3, 2009 • written by Aakash Hazari
Imagine being at a trial. You’ve prepped for months and planned for weeks for this moment. You enter the courthouse feeling nervous but think it’s not that bad. But when the trial starts, this all changes and any point, question, or comment you have is squashed by the opposing team’s statements. This is not just imaginative. It happened four years ago at Moreau’s first Mock Trial court hearing.
But this didn’t stop the team. It helped us progress.
As I’ve learned from my high school experiences, it takes hard work and dedication to succeed at anything. The time I put into activities allows me to reap its benefits in the end. So when I look back at my four years with the Mock Trial team I realize that I’ve learned a lot from my time with the team.
Since freshman year, I’ve been on the school’s very first Mock Trial team. Young, but determined, we started out completely lost, with no syllabus like the one you get at the beginning of a class. Before us, nobody at our school had even heard of Mock Trial. All we had were a few witness statements, a fact situation, and a couple diagrams. But amongst our team, there was something different – passion. Fueled by curiosity and a bit of fear, we finally gathered the audacity to get things started. It was a trying experience, testing everyone’s will and focus, including our more than patient moderator, history teacher Robert Parker.
It was a mad scramble, starting with our first meeting during the Martin Luther King holiday. We came to a deserted school on a three day weekend, only to realize the immense amount of work to be done which could only be characterized by one word – gulp. We met with Mr. Leone, a Mock Trial coach of many years, who acquainted us with the material and what we were supposed to do with it. We went through every little detail in a grueling drill session on Mock Trial, ranging from selecting an innocent looking person to play the role of the defendant to how to formulate questions and object as an attorney. Once it set in that we had months of work to do in the span of a few weeks, the panic vanished and all that was left was unrelenting focus.
It took weeks of research. Weeks of staying after school until five o’clock while coping with an already difficult set of classes and other extra-curricular activities. Weeks of Starbucks to gather the energy for another day’s worth of training. Even weeks of disagreement when attorneys, witnesses, and the moderator approached a piece of evidence differently.
And after all this, we found ourselves at our first trial, resolute in our suits with a firm swagger marked by the clicks of our shoes as we walked into the court house. The trial was carried out. Our witnesses were being grilled, silently giving yes/no answers with a look of trepidation in their eyes to the questions of the opposing attorneys. Their bold statements and calm manner obliterated any explanation our attorneys provided. We lost. Miserably. But as we left the court house, it would have seemed that we won the entire tournament. Despite the fact that our team had come together only weeks before, we actually made it through a trial with a good understanding of what happened and a goal to reach the stature of any opposing team using some valuable lessons we learned over the course of the trial.
So we went back to work, grinding out every little detail, again. With Mock Trial constantly on our minds, we used every resource available. Attorneys persistently practiced objections and questioning techniques. Witnesses read through statements and memorized them to the point of citing exact lines. It was a joint effort, with everyone contributing in any way possible to the benefit of the team. It took more than two years to get there. Where was “there?” “There” was our moment. Our success. It came against Piedmont and their extensive top-ranked Mock Trial team, complete with real attorneys as their coaches. All our efforts had finally paid off. Every drill, every memorized line, every statement we had practiced was executed with precision and perfection. We were finally able to hear the words we had wanted to hear for so long: “The court finds the defendant guilty.”
Although winning our first verdict was a high point for the team, Mock Trial has meant so much more to me than a study of the practices of law. It epitomizes the values of hard work, dedication and self-motivation. Mock Trial has also taught me the significance of working with others to accomplish a common goal. The teamwork involved with the preparation has shown me that knowledge is useless without the proper communication to explicate it. All these lessons have helped me stay on track, remain focused and grow socially and academically.
Being on the team has shown me what it takes to succeed, and I like to think that the combination of what I’ve learned has worked for me. After three years of Mock Trial, I’ve not only learned, but also become these values, employing them in every aspect of my life. Now, as a senior, I look to reach the league playoffs as leading prosecution attorney.
I look to succeed.
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Tagged: extracurriculars, goals, mock, mock trial, senior, trial
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