Of course, all of our planning at the beginning of the season would be for naught without a team. Therefore, the coaches also spend time recruiting students to participate in Mock Trial. Some coaches go to WIHS and speak to classes about the club. I speak to teachers about recruiting their most dedicated students. I also set up a table for Mock Trial at the afterschool activities fair. We encourage returning students to recruit their friends. We try to think of every avenue possible to get more students involved.
According to the rules of the New York State Bar Association, there needs to be at least eight students to field a team. Ideally, a team should have twelve to fifteen players. There are a total of twelve parts that can be played: there are three lawyers and three witnesses on both the plaintiff and defense side ((3+3)*2=12). If there are twelve players on a team, each person has only one role to play. Any additional students serve as backup players. On a competition day, six students are needed to play--only one side performs at a time.
We were all relieved when fifteen students showed up the first day of practice. We have trouble retaining students from season to season, and there is usually a large dropout rate throughout the course of the season. Last year, we had a student drop off the team only days before the first round of competition (via Facebook message, no less), reducing our number to seven. We scrambled to find a warm body to fill his role so that the months of practice would not go to waste for the rest of the team. The coaches ended up practicing with the new student the entire weekend before the competition, staying with her until almost midnight on a Sunday night to prepare her. We did not want any repeats of that this season. The fifteen faces in the room made everyone optimistic.
Students are not the only people we need to run a mock trial program, though. We always need coaches, and they are not easy to find. With every year attorneys stay at the firm, they are saddled with more work and have less time for volunteering. I have seen this happen time and time again with my volunteers. People volunteer a lot during their first year, and less during their second and third years. I rarely have anyone beyond a fourth year turn up for my programs.
This year, we got lucky. We got a new coach. Yana and Manoj were on their way home from Cleary one night and discussing Mock Trial during their car ride. The students had just completed a homework assignment. Yana wanted to talk about it, Manoj didn’t. This was pretty typical of interactions between Yana and Manoj. Luckily for them, they were sharing the car with a first year associate named Leza. When Leza heard Yana and Manoj talking about Mock Trial, she mentioned that she had participated in mock trial in high school. Attacking her from both sides, Yana and Manoj pitched the nearly impossible sell of volunteering for Mock Trial to Leza. By the end of the car ride, Leza was the newest coach of the Mock Trial team.
Leza certainly didn’t know what she was getting into when she agreed to be a coach. If she did, she would not have agreed to take on the responsibility. Luckily for us, she did, and I’m fairly certain she is happy about that decision now. It’s nearly impossible for me to sell mock trial to my volunteers. Telling most attorneys at Cleary that they’ll have to commit to volunteering about 10-15 hours a week and they’ll run as fast as they can in the other direction. The attorneys at Cleary already have a ridiculous amount of work on their plates. Mock Trial is by far the largest time commitment a volunteer can take on in any of the programs that I run at Cleary. But—once you’re hooked, it’s hard to back out of the commitment. The coaches of the Mock Trial team become attached to the students. It turns out to be an extremely rewarding experience, but at a high cost.
With all of this in order, the coaches were optimistic about the year. We had our students, we had our coaches, and we had a plan. It was just a matter of holding it all together—and maybe we could actually do it this time.
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