While most people are at the Ventura County Courthouse for unpleasant reasons, I was there competing with my Mock Trial team.
My role is slightly different from the rest of my team’s: My job is to write a newspaper article on one of my team’s trials as a courtroom reporter.
When third and second place for the Best Courtroom Journalist awards were announced at the awards ceremony, my heart sank knowing that I didn’t win anything this year. There was no way my name would appear with the first place title.
I was thankfully wrong: My name appeared on the screen as the first-place winner in the county.
I joined Mock Trial last year (my sophomore year) without really knowing what role I wanted to have in the club. I ended up choosing to be the courtroom journalist since I was already familiar with journalism being in The Isle File.
I surprisingly ended up taking 3rd place last year despite the fact that I was unsure of how my competition fully worked.
This year, our first two rounds started on Feb. 22, and our last two were the next day. I chose to write about our second round, which was against Royal High School. I had until Monday at noon to submit my article.
Getting first place at the county-level competition meant I got to compete at the state-level competition in L.A. I was really excited because I had never gotten to experience something like this before – it was also going to be my first time staying at a hotel.
The state competition was slightly different from county because I was only able to report on one designated round and I was supposed to have three hours to submit my article. Due to time delays, I ended up only having two hours to draft, write, and submit my story.
I didn’t do as best as I could due to the time delay. I ended up not getting any awards at state, which was disappointing knowing that I definitely could’ve done better.
Still, I’m definitely proud of winning first place at county, but my goal for next year is to win first place at state.
