Courtesy | Megan Williams
Three students received awards at the American Mock Trial Association’s Regional Tournament earlier this month and one team received a bid to compete at the Opening Round Championship Series.
Junior Abigail Elwell (Team 1300) and senior Jacob Hooper (Team 1299), took All-Regional Attorney Awards, and sophomore Konrad Verbaarschott (Team 1298) captured Hillsdale’s first double All-Regional Witness Award.
Among the college’s three mock-trial teams, Team 1299 received a bid for AMTA’s Opening Round Championship Series, after posting six wins, one loss, and one tie.
Team 1300 competed on Feb. 5 and 6, while teams 1299 and 1298 competed the following weekend. The tournaments involved four rounds of competition, with judges casting two ballots each round. Teams vied for invitations, called “bids,” to ORCS, where competitors will have the opportunity to secure spots at the national tournament.
Team 1298, with five wins and three losses, was placed on the open bid list, which allocates extra bids to teams who did not win them directly at the regional tournament. Team 1300, with four wins and four losses, did not receive a bid.
“We’re currently preparing two teams to go on,” said Jonathan Church, who coaches Teams 1298 and 1299. Church said that while he can’t know for sure, he feels confident that Team 1299 will receive an open bid for ORCS.
Church said if Hillsdale can send two teams, it will break a peculiar pattern of performance established in recent years.
“The AMTA does criminal case problems one year and then they do civil the next – so it rotates – and since 2015, we’ve sent two teams to the ORCS in civil years and we’ve sent one team in criminal years,” Church said. “Right now, it looks like this will be the first criminal year where we send two teams.”
Regionals was the first tournament of the competitive season and the teams have been preparing for their cases since the first week of January.
Sophomore Evalyn Homoelle said she felt confident going into the tournament.
“I typically get really stressed at tournaments,” Homoelle said, “but this one was very relaxing and I think everyone had a chance to show what we’ve been working on.”
Church described some potential causes of the teams’ successes.
“We focus a lot more on performance than we used to,” Church said. “We’ve always been strong on argumentation. We really have tried to do some work on making people sound the way our content is — powerful and polished.”
