March 11-13 in Decatur, Ga<\/a>.<\/p>\nPaladin teams A and B finished first and second Feb. 6-7 at the Columbia, S.C., Regional Tournament, while Team C took fourth at the Orlando, Fla., Regional Tournament two weeks later. Team D, made up entirely of first-year students, was one point from also advancing in Orlando.<\/p>\n
Decatur is one of eight ORCS, also known as super regional, sites around the country. Each will host 24 teams in an effort to whittle a field of 192 down to the final 48 that will descend on Greenville for the Bell Tower National Championship that begins April 15. The top six at each location keep their seasons alive.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the most grueling tournament of the year, because if you\u2019re a program like Furman you\u2019re supposed to have gotten here. No one\u2019s patting you on the back for doing well at the regionals,\u201d Furman mock trial team director Glen Halva-Neubauer, Ph.D., said. \u201cI\u2019m very proud of the students. They worked really hard. This doesn\u2019t always happen. Last year we only qualified one team to super regionals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schools can only be represented by two squads at the super regional regardless of how many qualify, so since the end of February Furman has been combining its four teams into the best two it can field in an effort to extend its streak of advancing to the national tournament to 20 consecutive years.<\/p>\n
Furman is also out to avoid the disappointment\u00a0of not competing in the national tournament it is hosting. The American Mock Trial Association awarding a school the right to put on the competition doesn\u2019t come with an automatic qualifier.<\/p>\n
Halva-Neubauer has been raising money, securing judges, and organizing competition locations at four different venues in Greenville for months, but nothing has caused him more stress than the prospect of his own kids not getting to compete.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I\u2019m probably most worried about getting a team to the championship. Not because I\u2019m worried about our kids\u2014I think we have a really great team this year. In fact, I think we have four great teams,\u201d Halva-Neubauer, Furman\u2019s Dana Professor of Political Science, said. \u201cBut it\u2019s that we have to compete in Atlanta to get this bid, and we haven\u2019t ever had to win this bid to the championship tournament at a venue other than Furman because we\u2019ve always hosted that tournament.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Columbia, the B team went undefeated while the A team lost a single ballot. Shannon Cherney \u201918, Chelsey Dawson \u201917 and Nathan Thompson \u201916 were named Outstanding Witnesses, while\u00a0Julia Reynolds \u201917 and Katherine West \u201919\u00a0were named Outstanding Attorneys.<\/p>\n
Furman racked up a similar number of individual awards in Orlando, where Samin Mossavi \u201917 and Whitney Busch\u00a0\u201917\u00a0were named Outstanding Witnesses and Hannah DuBois \u201917, Ben Longnecker \u201917 and Shannon Short \u201919\u00a0earned Outstanding Attorney honors.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s possible for both of Furman\u2019s teams in Decatur to advance to the national tournament, but Halva-Neubauer would be plenty happy with one.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne judge on one round can sideline you with a tie ballot or a minus-one, whatever,\u201d he said. \u201cSo the real issue is you just have to be as prepared as you can possibly be, and I know that we have the commitment and the work ethic to be prepared.\u201d<\/p>\n
Learn\u00a0more about\u00a0the Bell Tower Championship.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So far, so good for Furman mock trial in its quest to reach the Bell Tower Championship\u00a0the University is hosting next month for the first time. Thanks to strong performances […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":4329,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,67,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-mock-trial","category-politics-and-international-affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}