If you\u2019re in downtown Greenville in mid-April and it seems the demographic is skewing younger than usual, it won\u2019t be your imagination.<\/p>\n
Nearly 500 college students from 48 schools around the country will be coming to Greenville during that time to stay in hotels, eat at restaurants and wage daylong legal battles in three of the downtown courthouses.<\/p>\n
The students will be in town for the 2016 American Mock Trial Association\u2019s National Championship<\/a> that will take place at Furman University April 15-17.\u00a0 They are coming from every area of the country, and the students will be representing some of America\u2019s finest colleges, including Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, Duke, Cornell, Northwestern, Chicago, Michigan and UCLA.<\/p>\n Furman, which has one of the nation\u2019s top mock trial programs<\/a>, is also in the field, having qualified for the national tournament 20 consecutive years.<\/p>\n While Furman has hosted numerous regional competitions, it\u2019s the first time the university will have hosted the national tournament.\u00a0 Greenville will also be the smallest city the championship has ever visited.\u00a0 The last four national tournaments have taken place in Cincinnati, Orlando, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re very excited to be hosting the national championship, which is a massive undertaking for a school of Furman\u2019s size,\u201d said Dr. Glen Halva-Neubauer<\/a>, a professor of political science at Furman and director of the mock trial program.\u00a0 \u201cWe put a lot of time and effort into our mock trial program, and it\u2019s exciting to bring all these great colleges and universities to campus so we can show off both Furman and Greenville.\u201d<\/p>\n During the three-day competition, the students will assume the roles of both lawyers and witnesses as they participate in full \u201cmock\u201d trials in front of professional judges and attorneys.\u00a0 The 48 teams will be divided into two divisions of 24 teams each, and the first-place teams from each division will face off in the championship final round.<\/p>\n In addition to the Furman campus, the trials will be held at the Greenville Municipal Courthouse, Greenville County Courthouse and Haynsworth Federal Courthouse for the preliminary rounds of the tournament.\u00a0 The championship round will take place Sunday, April 17 in the Younts Conference Center at Furman.<\/p>\n The trials are open to the public.<\/p>\n More than 300 attorneys and judges from 22 different states will be serving as judges for the Bell Tower Championship.\u00a0 When adding students and their families to the total, Furman officials say more than 1,000 people will be involved in the tournament.<\/p>\n According to Halva-Neubauer, it has taken the entire Furman community to stage the national championship, from catering services to athletics to housing.\u00a0 But the most impressive achievement may have come from the university\u2019s carpentry shop, which has constructed a complete courtroom that will be used in Younts.\u00a0 The setup, built by Tony Whitaker and Wayne Merrill, includes a judge\u2019s bench, witness stand, 15-panel jury box, attorney tables, and a court reporter table.<\/p>\n \u201cWe could not have pulled off hosting a tournament of this magnitude without the assistance of everybody on campus,\u201d Halva-Neubauer said.\u00a0 \u201cAnd people are going to be especially impressed with the courtroom setup in Younts.\u201d<\/p>\n The Furman team consists of 10 members, and it is led by Nathan Thompson \u201916 of Arlington, Va., and Julia Reynolds \u201917 of Concord, Mass.\u00a0 The team had a sterling performance at the regional competition in Columbia and backed it with another exemplary showing at the super regional in Decatur, Ga.<\/p>\n The team is coached by Furman alums Chris Bowden, Brad Rustin, Steven Buckingham, and Chris Schoen.\u00a0 This year Furman fielded four mock trial teams involving 40 students, and the university is currently ranked No. 11 in the country out of nearly 600 teams.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are some of our brightest students who work for hours at perfecting their craft even though they have many other responsibilities on campus as student leaders,\u201d Halva-Neubauer said.\u00a0 \u201cThey are simply extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n A complete list of the teams competing in the Bell Tower Championship is here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n For more information about the tournament, visit the Bell Tower Championship website<\/a><\/strong> or contact Paige Blankenship at 864-294-3547 or paige.blankenship@furman.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re in downtown Greenville in mid-April and it seems the demographic is skewing younger than usual, it won\u2019t be your imagination. Nearly 500 college students from 48 schools around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":3371,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3,67,35,32,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-alumni","category-mock-trial","category-parent-news","category-politics-and-international-affairs","category-top-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368","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=4368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33289,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4368\/revisions\/33289"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}