Hillsdale College Mock Trial Team A won fifth place out of 24 at the Great Chicago Fire Invitational tournament hosted last weekend by the University of Chicago. 

“Top talent from around the nation was there – Harvard, Yale, UChicago, and the defending national champions UCLA,” senior and Team A co-captain Caleb Sampson said. 

The Great Chicago Fire Invitational is one of the two most competitive invitational tournaments in the mock trial season, according to Sampson. 

Hillsdale Team A competed against four highly-ranked teams, three of which are among the top fifteen teams nationally: Patrick Henry College Team A, the University of Michigan Team A, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Team A, and the University of Chicago Team A, according to Sampson and senior Justin Lee, Hillsdale Team A’s other co-captain. 

Hillsdale Team A defeated each of the teams from Patrick Henry College, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Chicago, with a ballot score of 2-1 in each match. They lost to the University of Michigan Team A with a ballot score of 1-2, according to Sampson. 

In addition to the team victories, Lee also won a 22-rank witness award, according to Sampson. 

Senior Curtis Herbert also performed well in the tournament, according to senior Abigail Davis. 

“He was awesome this weekend, and when, in one round, the judge kept out some of our evidence, he quickly adjusted his closing argument to be rhetorically persuasive with what we were able to get in,” Davis said. 

Herbert said he had to cut his closing argument from nine minutes to six and a half minutes while determining which evidence could be used most effectively in his speech. 

“The more experience you get in mock trial, the more you learn which things are really important to your case, and which things can go if they need to go,” Herbert said.

According to Herbert, the team performed particularly well in their last round against the University of Chicago Team A.

“I think our best round of the weekend was probably round four, which was against the University of Chicago’s A team, just in terms of the overall quality of the performance,” Herbert said.

According to Lee, UChicago Team A was ranked third in the nation at the time of the tournament. 

Sampson said that Hillsdale Team A will continue preparing with scrimmages and practices before its next tournament at regionals. 

“We’ll scrimmage some other teams to get real practice against real cases before we head into the official season,” Sampson said. “And of course we’ll be scrimmaging the B team and the C team as well, so everybody gets as much experience as possible, and so that iron sharpens iron among the teams.”

According to Lee, the team has room to continue growing after the tournament. 

“We performed well,” Lee said, “but at the same time there were a lot of really concrete things which we can improve on and are going to improve on.” 

Herbert said the team is optimistic about the rest of the season.

“There’s still lots of work to be done, which is actually encouraging because it means that there are still lots of things we can do to get better,” Herbert said. “We haven’t hit our ceiling yet.”