The last time UC San Diego made it to the American Mock Trial Association’s National Championship Tournament, the COVID-19 pandemic limited participants to joining on Zoom. Four years later, the team members are set to venture far beyond their computer screens.
After taking second place in AMTA’s Opening Round Championship Series in Los Angeles, 14 Tritons — nine students and five coaches — will enter the national stage, this time in person, from Friday to Sunday, April 4-6, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
It marks the first time since 2019 that UCSD’s group is traveling beyond the West Coast for a competition.
Several prominent schools will compete against the Tritons, including the University of Virginia, Harvard and UCLA, which finished just ahead of them in the competition’s opening round.
The significance of UCSD’s return to the national contest is not lost on Keshav Nair, one of the coaches. The former mock trial competitor said he hopes he can provide team members the same opportunities he had as a student.
“Our Zoom team didn’t get that [in-person] opportunity,” Nair said. “Most of those kids wound up competing online for most, if not all, of their college experience. So it’s really great that we finally have a chance … to see different parts of the country, see how advocacy differs … and just getting that broad educational experience.”
To pay for the trip and its accompanying expenses, Triton Mock Trial is turning to the community for help in fundraising.
Since launching a GoFundMe campaign March 9 at bit.ly/41RICm8, the group has received more than $7,000 in donations toward its goal of $10,000. In addition to contributions from family members and friends, the team has received money from members of mock trial competitors, including Arizona State University.
Triton Mock Trial is a student-run organization bolstered by members’ dues and support from volunteer coaches.
Third-year literature and writing major Ruby Grimes has many responsibilities in the group as a competitor, captain, board member and external relations liaison. She and fellow members have been active in spreading the word for their fundraiser. The limited timeline, she said, has been a uniting force for her and her peers.
“The turnaround of it has been really inspiring,” Grimes said. “And I think this is teaching us a lot about the community that we do have access to and goes to show how many people are rooting for us.”
Though Triton Mock Trial carries a roster of 37 members — the largest it has had — the national championship team consists of just nine members and five coaches. It will be the same group as in the opening round, which Nair said had great chemistry, polish and poise.
Included in that group are second-year political science majors Ellie Wang and Lannah Garcia. Both are team board members, with Wang serving as tournament director and Garcia as logistics director.
Garcia participated in mock trial groups in high school, but Wang’s journey began with a suggestion from a teacher’s assistant and coach, Riley Sutton, in her freshman year at UCSD. With a competition happening the same week she was recruited, Wang learned the inner workings of mock trials on the fly.
“I really quickly reviewed everything, wrote a really bad opening statement and I just went for it,” Wang said. “And now I’m very involved and I love it.”
While Wang and Garcia were excited to make the cut, it also meant they had their work cut out for them. In addition to the limited fundraising timeframe, the group now has less than two weeks to prepare for its new case.
Typically, practices are held three times during the week, with occasional three-hour scrimmages on the weekend. But recently, Wang said, the frequency of those meetings has increased to nearly every weekday and weekend.
Wang said she and her peers are “more than happy to give up that time, because we’ve seen what this activity has done for us in terms of developing our own skills and finding our own community.”
For Garcia, the Tritons’ appearance on the national stage represents something much larger than amplifying their school and their program.
“We are representing the entirety of our program, of everyone who helped us reach this moment, to any team that we’ve scrimmaged, to anyone who has even clicked on our page to look at our Instagram or our GoFundMe,” she said.
Beyond the recognition the competition brings, the time the team members spend together and the bonds they form make the mock trial experience worthwhile, Grimes said.
“What brought me to mock trial — which is maybe professional development and soft skill development — is not what made me stay,” Grimes said. “What made me stay are the friendships and connections I’ve been able to make out of it.”
Those connections can be built far beyond San Diego, Garcia said.
“It just feels like a culmination of what mock trial is supposed to be,” she said. “Obviously, we’re all competitive [and] we all want to win. But at its heart, it’s about just creating bonds and making connections with people from across states and from different colleges.”
To learn more about UCSD’s mock trial team, visit tritonmocktrial.com. ♦
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