Oratory Mock Trial Team in New Mexico: Day 2 noon

Day 2 for the Oratory Prep Mock Trial Team and the boys are allowed to “sleep in” until 9 a.m. today.  This is a big bonus for the boys since they had to be at Oratory yesterday, Wednesday, at 5:30 a.m. to catch the bus for Newark Airport and were up until 10:30 p.m. wrapping up their first scrimmage against Connecticut.
      Today is National Day of Prayer, so the boys would appreciate any prayers that you may offer on their behalf! They had a casual breakfast and then a team meeting this morning to go over the scrimmage against Connecticut last night. After a bit of down time this morning and through lunch, they need to be ready for their formal picture shoot at the Hyatt Hotel and from there they go right into their defense scrimmage against Arkansas.
     Coach Bill Martin says that he had to request the room for the scrimmage weeks in advance. Some teams like to get in the scrimmages, others not so much. Chris Darcy, a 2009 OP grad and assistant to Coach Martin says practice through scrimmaging can only help. Side bar on Chris. He knows what he’s talking about since he was a part of the OP Mock Trial Team for three years and was on the team in 2007, his sophomore year when the boys were third in the state and competitors in the American Mock Trial Invitational Competition in which they placed 5th in the nation. He has worked with Bill Martin through the years. Now in his senior year at Fordham, Chris plans to attend law school next year.
     Last night Chris addressed the boys with his philosophy of how teams fare in these big competitions. “Some teams that are really good don’t do well here (at the national level) because they can’t handle the pressure.” He explained that some of the teams at Nationals got where they are with state titles because of constant hard work and smoothing out the kinks in their presentations through repetition. “This is a really dense case this year with a tremendous amount of material for the teams to digest in a very short amount of time. With that time crunch, there will be teams that might fall apart because they haven’t had enough time to cram.”
     Speaking of “cramming,” when the boys went for dinner and an hour of sightseeing in Old Town last night, Scott Turtur, one of OP’s three attorneys, was seen with a shoulder bag overloaded with notebooks and materials. When asked why he was carrying it on the outing, he quipped, “You gotta study the case notes every chance you get!”
     Every team member who plays an integral role in the case deals with stress in his own way. Fellow attorney on the team Conor Mooney said, “We each do our own thing.” Connor remembers being given advice from a family friend who is a lawyer who told him before a trial, “Calm yourself down. Do whatever that takes whether it’s meditation or prayer, clearing your mind, whatever.” Conor says his personal secret weapon is to take deep, slow breaths before starting.
      Chaperons, parents and teens are all taking deep breaths now in anticipation of Friday and Saturday’s round one, two, three and four that will determine the top ten schools and ultimately the National Champions that will be announced on Saturday night at the Awards Gala and Dance.