Success and Failure

While I may have been cheated out of a spot on the top science bowl team, it seems that I have done the cheating on the team assignments for mock trial. I won't lie; I was very pleased with my performance at the Mini Mock in December, which surpassed my best expectations. This, however, was probably because my expectations were rather low in the first place. Granted, there are a lot of incompetant people in mock trial, but there are also a handful of very, very good ones--far better than me, and with far more experience too. The good people, when at the bottom of their game, are much better than me at the top of mine. Since the top competitive team is composed of seven people, I figured that I was realistically destined to receive a relatively important role in the second team. Alas, it was not meant to be, for Beth Ford and I are the lawyers on the first team. Murphy probably gave one of his exaggerated dissertations about me to the attorneys.

This seems a little unfair for all the obvious reasons (i.e. other people are probably better qualified, and so on), but it also means that if I mess up, the team is pretty much toast. From my limited experience, lawyering in mock trial is one of those depressingly capricious tasks, in which success is probably more determined by uncontrollable factors: the judge, the case, the jury, etc. No matter how good you get--and one can only get so good--a significant part of the competition is a bitter, stochastic soup.