Tufts Mock Trial (TMT) continued its streak of recent successes this spring as it earned a bid to Nationals for the sixth consecutive year, according to TMT President and senior Nick Teleky.
TMT’s road to Nationals began with the Regional competition, where over 600 different schools competed for 192 bids to the Opening Round Championship Series (ORCS), the nationals-qualifying tournament for the American Mock Trial Association (AMTA). Though Tufts earned three bids to ORCS this year, AMTA regulations only allow a school to send up to two teams to ORCS. TMT sent an A and a B team that consisted of the club’s most experienced members.
The A team, captained by Teleky and senior Anna Lyons, faced off against teams from Suffolk University, Rutgers University, Yale University and Columbia University, and ultimately earned a bid to Nationals with six wins, one loss and one tie.Additionally, Teleky won an Outstanding Attorney award, and Lyons won an Outstanding Witness award.“This season has probably been the best that Tufts Mock Trial has ever had,” Teleky told the Daily in an email. “The freshmen this year are [some] of the best we’ve ever had … and the seniors are also particularly strong.”
The B team, captained by juniors Sara Weiss and Katie Grosch, competed against teams from Harvard University, University of Rochester, Cornell University and Washington & Jefferson College to finish with a record of four wins and four losses, which wasn’t good enough to qualify for Nationals. However, Teleky still views their experience at ORCS to be invaluable.
“They hit some of the best teams in the country, and really did a great job,” Teleky said. “The experience of competing against other Nationals-quality programs in particular will be really useful for the program for the years to come.”
The A team will be competing against 47 other teams in Nationals this year, which will be held in Cincinnati, Ohio from April 17-19. However, the team will have to adjust to a new rule introduced this year that stipulates that teams will have to compete with a brand new case at Nationals, which was released on March 22.
This is quite a change for the team, which is used to using the same case from September to Nationals. However, TMT hardly sees this as a problem, according to External Affairs Officer Eve Feldberg.
“Time might be our number one challenge, but it’s kind of cool because it’s a level playing field for everyone,” Feldberg, a sophomore, said. “If anything, [the time constraint] will motivate us to practice more and stay on top of things.”
Despite its recent successes, TMT has not always been a powerhouse, according to Teleky. Teleky believes that attending invitational tournaments allowed the young TMT to gain competitive experience and get it to where it is now.
“A lot of the growth in the club can be accredited to going to these invitationals tournaments, which don’t count toward going to nationals, because they give a feel for what the actual tournament rounds are and allow us to train our new members,” Teleky said. “It’s essentially a sandbox for freshman and sophomores who want to try out new things, and it doesn’t really matter much if they take risks that don’t work out.”
As a result, the club has been able to produce competitive teams with strong chemistry, according to Teleky.
“As a team, we gel together a little bit better than past teams,” Teleky said. “Some used to have fights or get into disagreements over silly things, and we haven’t had a whole lot of problems with that yet. We just work better together.”
For this reason, TMT is both an academic and social club for members like first-year Caroline McBrien.
“Sometimes [TMT] feels like an academic club because of all the public speaking and long practices," McBrien said. “But at the same time, I enjoy being in a community and team with supportive members.”
Another unique facet of this club is that it's entirely student-run. Though the lack of advisors and coaches forces members to learn on their own and from each other, Teleky sees this autonomy as a plus.
“We’re one of the highest ranked teams in the country that doesn’t have any coaching staff at all, and one of the few student-run teams to make it to Nationals,” Teleky said. “That can present a challenge -- we have to spend more time understanding the law, assigning the best people to roles that suit them and practicing on our own. But it does give us more creative flexibility, which is a huge benefit.”
There are some points the team hopes to improve on, however. One aspect has to do with keeping its members’ enthusiasm high throughout an entire trial, according to Teleky.
“It’s hard to keep judges, who are often giving up their weekends to judge us, interested and excited about what can quickly become a dull trial,” Teleky said. “At a competitive level, you want to focus on making your trial entertaining, something the judges would want to watch and be interested in.”
Another aspect involves dealing with mistakes made in competition, according to Teleky.
“I feel like a lot of teams try to focus on not making mistakes, but a team’s skill shows most with how they deal with these mistakes,” Teleky said. “The difference between a good team and an excellent team is the ability to make imperfection look perfect.”
However, TMT faces a challenge that practice can't overcome: funding. There was not enough money in the TCU supplementary fund to cover travel expenses to nationals this year, and the team's national travel expenses have been cut for next year, according to Teleky. The decision by the TCU Senate to cut travel funding is especially detrimental to clubs like TMT, whose primary objective is to compete by travelling, according to Feldberg.
“[TCU Senate’s decision] affects everything, especially because as a competition team, we have to travel to compete, and if we can’t compete, there’s really no point in us existing,” Feldberg said.
Additionally, since the trip to Nationals is normally subsidized through the supplementary fund, which Teleky explained senate uses to fund trips or projects that weren’t planned for at the beginning of the year, TMT will have to act entirely independently from the senate for the rest of this year. The club was able to use the crowd sourcing website GoFundMe to get its members to Nationals this year, according to Feldberg.
“People on the team shared [the GoFundMe page] on their Facebook page and emailed their relatives, and the response was just overwhelmingly positive and great,” Feldberg said.After facing these dilemmas, and with a hard-working and talented team, TMT is optimistic about its performance at Nationals this year, according to Teleky.
“This is probably one of our best shots at winning a trophy at Nationals and bringing it back to Tufts, which is really cool,” Teleky said.
