Uh-uh. I've decided this is not the way Mock Trial is going down this year.

The root of the problem is this. People are becoming seniors. And with that, with those years of experience, they've gained a newfound knowledge, and a certain cockiness and confidence. I've known that, because it happend with me last year. But now... everyone's starting to pass that threshold, that point where they feel that they're above the school, above the teachers, and above the rest of the student populace. When that happens, kids take advantages liberally, and they abuse the system for their own greed and self-gain.

The actual state of our Mock Trial Team this year, as I see it. Instead of holding tryouts, and judging based on skill, we somehow decided to elect the students that would be playing the attorney roles. Now, there are always the usual allegations, whenever democratic processes take place, of a devolution into simple popularity games. In this case, it's one of the few examples where it's literally true, and explicity manifest. Note that all six of the attorneys elected, happened to be seniors. Note also that, a few notable players, at least in my mind, Jonathan Chee, who along with myself has been the only person who's stuck with this club from the beginning, the whole four years, yet also one of the quieter members, and Angela Betancourt, probably better than all but 3 or 4 members on the team, yet a simple sophomore, didn't make it onto the attorney team. The attorney team that we have isn't bad... they've all got decent experience, but there's a clear bias in the way that this team was chosen.

With witnesses, at the moment it stands that we have 8 witness roles, and somewhere around a dozen or more students jockeying for those roles. Needless to say, some of these students are going to be left with no role at all, save some abysmal title role as "court cartoonist" or "understudy." All the while, we've had claims of "they'll gain valuable experience from observing." Please. You, and I, and everyone else knows these kids are essentially being stationed as permanent benchwarmers.

At least we have no such "elections" for the witness roles. We'll be having some tryouts, but there's again a clear bias in the selection process. For the lead role, we've already slotted Jonathan Chee there - a choice I don't disagree with, except for the fact that he was given automatic precedence for that role, over anyone else, simply as he was a senior. Although I'd agree that Chee is likely the best one for the role, and should have even been an attorney, there is no reason that another student, such as junior Sergio Pardo, should be denied any opportunity to demonstrate his ability, given a chance to prove whether or not he could be better.

What're the implications? There are a lot of performance problems, especially looking to the future. For all these attorneys who have greedily and blindly elected themselves and their senior counterparts to attorney spots, have any of them thought about the effects on next year's team, when all of us current seniors have moved out, and left a bunch of underclassmen with not a single match of attorney experience among them? Or what of the type of program this Mock Trial "Club" has become? An exclusionary one, and for chrrissakes doesn't even exclude based on the merit. Just election polls and seniority. In my mind, this is worse than CSF. People join a club, or join an organization, with the intent to particpate in that organization's activities and functions. To deny anyone the chance to participate, even if they were pathetically skilled (and so far, every single member has a competency far removed from that), so long as they were dedicated and willfully interested, is completely reprehensible, given that we're a high school organization. We are not a ruthless, cutthroat business intently focused on that bottom line. We are not another sports team that just wants to win a game and make the playoffs. Those are goals to strive for, surely, but not models that we should build a mock trial club around. A high school organization is, first and foremost, a service to the students. This organization exists for students to learn, and for students to have fun, and excluding some, arbitrarily, by denying them the chance to have any role, completely detracts from that. What kind of a message does it send to students, when we say "Sorry, we don't have enough room for you to participate." That is complete bull. In my entire time with Journalism Club, I have never, and will never, tell a student that we do not have enough room in our paper to print his or her article. I will simply expand the number of pages, or if need be, I'll sacrifice some of my own space, forego a column or article or two of my own to make room, which I've done on numerous occassions. There is nothing preventing us from ensuring that every student has at least one chance to be up in the court room.

The solution, then. The attorney roles are virtually carved in stone, so there is not much to be done on that; I highly doubt any attorney would give up their role, for a more deserving member to get his or her chance (and even that is a bit ambiguous). However, for our witness roles, there is no reason that several members cannot play a single part. We have three matches each for the prosecution and defense teams, and witness roles can be divided up between those, with one student taking on a match or two, and another student taking on the role for the other matches. Yes, this will create performance problems, with a lack of consistency among the witnesses from match to match, but for the future of Mock Trial, in upcoming years, the experience that these witnesses get, from having even one match up there in the court, rather than sitting around "observing" the other students, will in the future better the team far more than it will be a detriment to this year's, especially so since all of the students currently being excluded are those underclassmen, in favor of all of the seniors. Furthermore, we accomplish the one goal that mock trial, as a high school club, strives for, or should be striving for: enabling participation for all those dedicated and interested. In the past, interest has always been a slight problem, and we've always had to scrap around for more members, or more competent ones. Now, for the first time for as long as I can remember, we are overstocked. We have got more than the required amount of team members. And, this one year where we've actually got major interest, where we've actually gotten an abundance of students who actually give a damn about this organization, the seniors in their pigheadidness decide to take what they can for themselves and leave the scraps for everyone else. Witnesses need to be split up, to allow everyone to particpate, and if warranted, even the attorney roles should be split, not only to give everyone a chance to particpate, but to give others a shot at the attorney role and some real experience up at the counsel's desk.

What's going on now isn't right. Steps need to be taken to correct gaping flaws and injustices in the entire work model of this organization, and the solutions are right in front of us, even well beyond what I've written here.

This is Nathan Yan, your Westmoor Mock Trial blog writer. Make it a great day or not, the choice is yours.