After months of practice, Diamond Bar High School’s Mock Trial team participated in their first competition of the season last week. 

The team has a rigorous practice schedule, meeting via Zoom after school Monday through Thursday for an hour and a half. Although many clubs have faced issues surrounding technical difficulties, Mock Trial members say that they have experienced few to no issues since making the transition.

“After school we’d all go on a Zoom call together to work on our questions and put together our case and it’s working pretty well since we use a lot of breakout rooms this year,” junior Eileen Zhu said via text. 

Overall, members of the group say that they felt the event went fairly well, though most still prefer in-person events to online ones. 

“There were some weird audio issues because [the] internet is like that but it [the competition] was still pretty fun, although, it would’ve been more exciting if it were in-person,” Zhu said. “But for the first run virtually it went relatively smoothly and it was very, very entertaining as well.” 

Retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Ron Rose adjudicated the competition. Rose had also judged for the team in their final competitions for the last two years. 

Although the team ultimately lost the verdict, they are still confident in their performance as a whole.

“Our witnesses didn’t crumble under cross examination and both our opening and closing were much more developed. Our pretrial was also a lot better [and] our attorney could actually answer questions from the judge in a coherent manner,” Senior Aaron Hao said via Messenger. 

In the following week, the group will go on to compete in the second round of the competition.“[I’m] looking forward to future rounds but it’s only going to get harder from here because teams improve after each round,” Zhu said. “[I’m] a little nervous but mostly excited for more competitions.”