Two Tufts mock trial teams will compete next month at the American Mock Trial Association's (AMTA) National Championship tournament in Washington, D.C., marking the fourth straight year Tufts will have competed.
After a successful showing at the Opening Round Championship Series (ORCS) in Easton, Penn., last weekend, Tufts has placed two teams among the top 48 that will compete for the championship title, according to Brian Pilchik, a former captain and member of the Tufts A-team. This is the first time Tufts will send two teams to the championship, Pilchik said.
"There are over 300 different schools represented in the nationwide tournament and hundreds of them don't make it to Nationals, so for a school to be taking up two spots is certainly unusual," Pilchik, a junior, said.
The Tufts A and B teams placed second and third respectively at ORCS, ranking them as two of the six teams who competed in Easton to move on.
The final tournament will run from April 12 through 14 in Washington D.C., according to the AMTA website, where Tufts will face former champions such as Duke University and University of Virginia, who also placed two teams for the Nationals.
In addition to qualifying for the National Championship as teams, several TMT members also achieved individual awards, Pilchik said. Senior Alexander Gottfried and junior Nina Watts both received Outstanding Witness Awards, and Pilchik received an Outstanding Attorney Award.
The awards signal that these three students stood out as some of the best competitors in the tournament, according to Pilchik.
Gottfried, who is also co-captain of the A-team, hopes that this year's successes will make Tufts a more prominent contender in the future.
"I think a lot of people last year thought that maybe we had a couple good people at the top, but we didn't necessarily have that depth that some of the other programs [had]," Gottfried said. "But I think what we've shown with this result is that the depth of our program is very strong."
Gottfried attributes much of the team's growing success to experience and greater confidence among its teammates.
"The first time that we went to Nationals, it was very new to us and we didn't know what to expect. But now a lot of the seniors on the team are veterans," he said. "The seniors on the team have never known a time when Tufts hasn't made it to Nationals, so we almost expect it, and we know what needs to be done, what kind of work needs to go into getting back to Nationals year after year."
Gottfried and Pilchik agreed that the new influence of freshmen team members has been especially valuable to the team.
"I don't know if Admissions is doing a better job or what, but the freshman class year after year has just been increasingly, amazingly powerful," Pilchik said. "It's absolutely been a benefit, rather than a vulnerability, that we have so many freshmen. They bring great ideas, lots of energy to the team, and apparently it's really working out for us."
There is a chance that the Tufts A and B teams could face each other for the championship - although two teams from the same school have not faced each other since 1992, the strength of both teams makes such a match a possibility, Gottfried said.
Regardless of whether the two teams face each other or not, their goal is to win the championship.
"It's definitely going to be tough," Gottfried said. "There are a lot of good teams there. And really anything can happen once you get to Nationals."
