I am in the Boise airport, waiting to board my flight home to California, after attending high school mock trial nationals with the Phillips Exeter mock trial team, which I coach.

I am, I must confess, tired and disappointed.  You are not sure, as the weekend progress, how you have done, but we thought by the end of yesterday that we had won three trials and lost one.  It turned out, when the results were released this morning, that we won only one trial and lost three.  So instead of being, as we hoped, something like tenth in the nation, we were thirty-fourth.  Disappointing.

The Phillips Exeter mock trial team has won the New Hampshire state championship; the team will compete at nationals for the fourth time in five years.

This year was different, very different, because I live in California not New Hampshire.  So I was not able to work with the Exeter students in person, only by phone, email, text message, Skype sessions.  It was not easy:  some times I could not reach them or they could not reach me, sometimes the connection would drop or the voices would garble.  But they worked away to read and master the case, an aggravated assault charge against a teenager, arising out of a knife pulled at a graduation party.  The students held tryouts and formed three teams, A team, B team, and C team, each with about ten students.  I focused almost all my energy on A team, hoping they would win and go on to nationals.  I spent a bit of time with B team and no time with C team.

Yesterday was graduation day here at the Phillips Exeter Academy.  A wonderful, emotional, difficult day.

It was a beautiful, sunny day here, and graduation was held on the lawn in front of the main academy building, where the dog Sunny and I have walked so many times.  My daughter Lydia—intelligent, beautiful, poised, gracious—was among the 318 students who received their diplomas from Principal Hassan.  Lydia graduated with honor, a member of the Cum Laude society, the students with the highest cumulative grades.  My wife Masami and I had many of the customary emotions of parents at high school graduation.  “When did she get to be a beauty?  When did he grow to be so tall?  Wasn’t it yesterday that they were small?”

I have just returned from the national high school mock trial championship, held this year in Madison, Wisconsin.  It was an exciting, exhausting, and in the end somewhat disappointing weekend.

Most of us traveled Wednesday, arriving in Madison after nine that night.  The next morning, at nine, we had our first scrimmage, against a solid team from Jonesboro High in Georgia.  We have a team connection to Jonesboro High:  our state coordinator, the great Kyle Skinner, competed for Jonesboro when he was in high school.  Competed at the highest level, winning the national championship one year.  This year’s Georgia team was not that good, but they were good, with some interesting ideas.  For example, the first words of the Georgia defense opening were “Occam’s Razor.”  We had considered, briefly, using the very same phrase as our defense opening, but rejected it because we thought it too obscure, too erudite. 

Phillips Exeter has once again won the NH state championship; we are once again headed to the national championships.  I cannot claim to be surprised–we were the favorites heading into this weekend’s state competition–but I am so pleased.

 

In December, we formed three teams for the state championship; an A team composed mainly of experienced seniors and uppers; a B team with some strong lowers and preps; and a C team, also of lowers and preps.  The case, originally from Georgia, was a murder at sea; two men went out shrimp fishing, the boat went down, one of them, Sam, was picked from the sea, and the other, Jude, washed up on the beach, with stab wounds matching Sam’s knife.  We assigned roles–who was going to be Sam, who was going to be the police detective–and we went to work.