Ezra Pipik and the rest of the Temple Mock Trial are no strangers to long hours of practice and thorough research. For the group of full-time students, memorizing case law and participating in weekly three-hour-long scrimmages requires serious dedication.
“It’s a lot of work,” said Pipik, a senior criminal justice major and president of Temple Mock Trial. “I mean, just hours wise, I don’t think I’ve spent a year in a mock trial where I didn’t spend more time on it than any class I’ve ever had.”
But this year, the long hours paid off. After winning six of eight rounds at the Regional Tournament, Temple’s Mock Trial A Team received a bid for the American Mock Trial Association’s Opening Round Championship Series tournament on March 8-9.
The team’s wins allowed them to advance with the other top 192 of 790 teams to receive the invitation. At ORCS, Temple’s team competed against 24 others in hopes of securing one of six spots to advance to the national championship. After securing three wins and five losses, they did not qualify for the national championship, but members are still hopeful for the team’s future following a largely successful season.
In addition to the team’s collective success in the previous regional round, Hailey Timmons, a senior history major and the club’s vice president, received an Outstanding Attorney award for work during the competition. She was awarded alongside two other Temple attorneys and three Temple witnesses for their character executions.
Despite the team’s recent accolades, their performances at the beginning of the year paled in comparison to their triumph at regionals. The A and B teams only won a combined three rounds at the team’s first invitational, making it apparent that major changes to their scheme were needed.
“We were like, ‘Oh my gosh, how does [this] happen?’” Timmons said. “I don’t regret it, because I think that’s what made us better. To understand we don’t want to feel this loss ever again.”
Pipik, Timmons and the B Team’s captains took those losses to heart. Following the first invitational, the team had what Pipik described as a practice of honesty, and candidly told the team what needed to change to make progress during the next year.
In response, both the A and B teams put in the work and exceeded expectations.
“The team that I was leading actually had a majority of the new members,” said Olivia DeMaio, a senior legal studies major and one of the B Team co-captains. “It was really impressive to see all the growth from them. There was a point in the season [where] we were able to win more than half of our actual competition rounds.”
As captain of the B Team, DeMaio’s work with new members was extensive but rewarding.
“It gives me a lot of pride because they did a lot of work, which then makes me proud that I’ve been able to motivate them to do that kind of work,” DeMaio said. “It gives me a lot of confidence in the quality of the team.”
The team’s excellence is partially due to the outstanding performance by its young core. The club has a limited number of veteran mock trial contributors, with only five graduating seniors, and about half of the 23-member group competing in their first year at the collegiate level.
The combination of great leadership from the team’s veterans and raw energy from rookie members has brought not only success for this year, but hope for the future.
Anjali Iyengar, a 2024 psychology alumna and co-captain of the B Team, led an all-freshman team excluding herself and DeMaio. The co-captains hope their direction of the team will leave a lasting imprint on the returning members.
“All of the captains are leaving, all four of us, so we’re really hoping that the new leadership makes the club their own while also remembering all the information that they got over the past years,” said Iyengar. “There’s definitely a lot of potential, like some of them are better than any members I’ve ever seen on the team, and I think that they can all do really well.”
The future of the team leaves lingering hope for the captains aiming to leave a legacy, but there’s no doubt the team’s focus lies in their upcoming competition.
“I’m extremely confident,” Pipik said. “I feel like the lineup that we’re putting together now is the best I’ve felt about it all season, and definitely, honestly, the best I felt about in my three years.”
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