Courting fate
My life changed forever when my year nine history teacher decided I was his fifth-favourite student. Had I written a slightly nicer Christmas card that year, I would never have ended up competing in and convening the World Championships of Mock Trial over a dozen times, standing in Times Square the night Trump beat Clinton, or sanctioning coaches from California while sitting in my bedroom in Sydney.
Life has a funny way of opening doors to you. Seemingly trivial decisions can sometimes send you down the rabbit hole into a series of events that you never thought possible.
Because I was number five on Mr Walsh’s list of favourites, and teachers were only allowed to submit four requests, I missed out on being in his homeroom group in year ten. Instead, I ended up with the unknown Ms Mountain as my homeroom teacher. She was coaching the mock trial team that year, and knowing that I was a debater she suggested I check it out.
Mock trial is a contrived court case. Two teams, the prosecution (or plaintiff) and defence each present legal arguments and witnesses, doing their best to act like real lawyers. The teams are scored by legal professionals and the team with the most points wins.
Not knowing any better, and feeling slightly intimidated by the smarter, older kids, I dragged my friend Zac along to the first team meeting for some company. We ended up being the witnesses on the team, together with a barrister who had a real-life barrister for a grandfather, a gifted orator as our closer, and the most talented multitasker I’ve ever met, Viran, join the team as our solicitor
On some days, we snatched victory from the jaws of defeat with narrow wins when Zac and I picked up nearly-perfect scores. We had days when our barristers so expertly dominated their opposition that they effectively struck out the entire witness testimony.
The culmination of this rollercoaster first year was our grand final. Hosted in the University of Sydney’s moot court, we brought along a 50-strong crowd to cheer us on as we edged out our opponents from Coffs Harbour. We thought we’d just won a fun competition, but more was to come.
In February of 2015, an invitation from a group called Empire Mock Trial appeared, inviting us to represent Australia in “The World Championship of Mock Trial.”
We flew to San Francisco to compete in late November of 2015. Our three attorneys had only finished their leaving exams a few weeks before, and had understandably been enjoying some well-earned rest. We’d always skated through trials before, so we were expecting more of the same this time. As we opened our laptops to look at the case en route to the US, we started to realise that, actually, this ‘world championship’ was serious business.
We were fortunate that our drama and debating backgrounds gave us a talent for thinking on our feet. Unlike many of our opponents, who would rehearse examinations and speeches all day, we relied on our skillsets to improvise our way through trials with more responsiveness than others.
While we enjoyed it, we thought mock trial was a bit lame. What we discovered at Empire was a whole different world. We didn’t just turn up to trials in a classroom, we first attended an opening ceremony at the gorgeous San Francisco City Hall. Infectious enthusiasm bubbled away as anticipation for the competition proper reached fever pitch.
The trials themselves were pure adrenaline. Here we were, a bunch of kids who just did mock trial because it sounded fun, competing in a federal courthouse.
At the end of it all, a team from Sydney who didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into had come from nowhere and taken out fourth in a highly competitive field. Crazy.
Fast forward 12 months to my last year of high school, and somehow we persuaded our school to let us go to New York again to compete, despite a mediocre showing in the previous year’s domestic tournament.
After a brief mixup at the airport involving our flight being rerouted through Houston, we took off on Election Day 2016 for New York City. I’m not sure how history will look back on the Trump presidency, but as we stood in Times Square on Election night watching the results roll in we certainly had an inkling that it was, at minimum, a local maximum of political drama.
Competing that weekend was a rollercoaster of emotion. I was desperately sick and only managed to eat one plain bagel between Friday and Sunday night. After an excellent first day, we ran out of gas on day two and eventually finished eleventh in a field of 48 teams from 7 countries. On another day results might have swung differently, but not this day.
Mock trial is a strange sport. I’ve often thought it’s the ultimate team sport because, unlike almost any other sport, you can’t have one person carry the team on their back to victory. The scoring simply doesn’t work like that. Knowing that, and knowing that we had probably lost our final round, my closing argument on a Sunday night in Brooklyn felt hollow. My mouth was moving, but the tank was empty. The jig was up.
I’ll look back on those competitive days with nothing but pride, but also a tinge of regret at not having been able to secure a better result in the final standings. I was acutely aware of the unique role I played in the team. I was our captain, and even if my trial expertise wasn’t as sharp, it was my role to inspire and motivate the team. I wish I’d had the energy to do that.
In my first year out of high school in 2017, I became interested in the prospect of “blue shirting” at another Empire competition. “Blue Shirts” were the volunteers who helped to run trials at Empire, so-named because of their navy polos. They helped with everything from responding to questions to serving meals to helping to run trials.
Being a Blue Shirt sounded fun, but flights to America weren’t cheap, and I was hesitant to spend what little money I had.
Cue the Airline Industry’s policy of overbooking flights.
United Airlines ended up at the centre of a public outrage when they dragged a 69-year-old Vietnamese American off an overbooked flight from Chicago to Kentucky, leaving him with a concussion and several broken teeth.
As ticket prices plummeted in the ensuing PR bloodbath, I managed to score heavily discounted flights to both the Atlanta and San Francisco editions of the 2017 season, while staying with a friend in Birmingham, Alabama in between.
I often joked in the leadup to my trip that since I was ‘vaguely ethnic’, if United overbooked another flight I would be the first to hop off — no encouragement necessary.
By the end of the Fall season, I was hooked.
The adventure of it all was everything I loved. It put me in a high-pressure situation that demanded processing a lot of information, testing it against competition operational procedures, and doing so under intense time pressure. It was also the first time Viran and I linked up at a tournament as staff, and it proved the start of a long and successful partnership.
Sitting in the departure lounge of San Francisco International Airport at the end of this three-week adventure, I reflected sadly that I probably wouldn’t make it back again for another Empire.
It was at about 10:30pm on that Monday night that the fate made its next intervention. In a moment too perfectly poetic to be real, United Airlines had once again overbooked a flight.
They offered incentives for people to get off the flight, and when the offer rose to a $600 travel credit, I took it.
I like to think it was masterful manipulation of the situation that made the United staff agree to increase the value of my voucher to US$1000, but looking back it was probably just standard company policy.
Had I not gotten that money, I very much doubt I would have returned for 2018. Financial commitments elsewhere meant that I didn’t want the extra expense of a trip to the US. But as fate would have it, I didn’t need to worry about that. The travel credit covered the trip in its entirety, and even bought me a nice upgrade to an exit row seat.
Throughout 2018 I took on extra responsibility, interviewing and training blue shirts for the upcoming season. I was the master of Ceremonies in Atlanta in 2018 and had a ball. Nothing gets the blood pumping quite like a room of 400 frenzied mock trial students.
Sitting back in Sydney on the phone to Empire’s Executive Director, Justin, one afternoon after Atlanta, he joked that I should come to the San Francisco competition in a few weeks. I told him that if he was crazy enough to pay, I was crazy enough to do it.
Turns out that Justin and I were the same amount of crazy, and 9 days later I found myself on a plane to San Francisco to surprise the team. I was away from Sydney for a total of 6 days, spending just four nights in ‘Frisco. Once again, it was a high-octane, high-pressure weekend mixed in with fun and friends; the classic Empire experience. It did enough to sell me on the idea that not only could I be more to Empire than I had been before, but Empire could be more to me than I had thought possible.
That summer, Justin told me that the Director of Competition Experience, Amber, wouldn’t be renewing her role in 2019. The DCE role is basically a glorified events planner role, and Justin asked if I was keen.
It was going to be a serious undertaking. It wasn’t just rocking up to tournaments and charming coaches, it was a year-long planning pursuit spanning everything from marketing to schools and managing registrations to coordinating food delivery and managing hotel bookings for all three tournaments.
After realising that my uni degree wasn’t really going anywhere fast, I decided to give the biggest logistical undertaking of my life a red hot crack.
It was a stressed Oscar that landed in Atlanta on September 17th, eyes wide in the headlights of a two-month commitment that had serious stakes attached. In previous tournaments I’d taken on a major role, but this time I was quarterbacking the show.
The tournament went by smoothly, and by closing ceremony the energy in the room was pure dynamite. Before the ceremony starts, there’s always a slideshow of some of the highlights of the weekend playing up on the big screens. A photo of me came up, and that was enough to tip the feverish mock trial kids over the edge: they started chanting my name. “Oscar! Oscar! Oscar!” — all 400 of them. How many people will walk out to a room of 400 people chanting their name in their life? Here I was experiencing it at a mock trial competition in Atlanta, Georgia.
Whoever had been scripting my mock trial journey so far had decided to dial the rock star energy up to 11. I was just happy to be along for the ride.
Five years ago, Viran and I were vague friends who debated together and started doing mock trial for no other reason than that’s what overcommitted people do. Now, we were arriving in New York within a few minutes of each other for the showpiece event, ready to be being wined and dined by hotel executives, order around coaches 40 years our senior, and command a 20-strong volunteer group.
New York is unlike any other place on earth. It’s a place where stuff just happens. Our opening ceremony was held in the same room that three years earlier held the Trump Campaign’s election night party. On that same election night I’d stood a few blocks down the road in Times Square and watched the results on the big screens. Where ‘The Donald’ stood 3 years earlier and declared improbable victory, I now stood, equally improbably, telling kids to not move chairs in courtrooms.
Our trials took place in courts which had played host to the Titanic wrongful death lawsuits, motions to censor James Joyce’s Ulysses and later the Pentagon Papers, and the trial of the pirate who hijacked the Maersk Alabama (of Captain Phillips fame) to name just a few. As we looked out the window the Tab room, we could see the building where Jeffery Epstein had been held until just a few months earlier.
After detours through Washington DC and San Diego, the 2019 season drew to a close where I’d begun 4 years earlier in San Francisco. It was a fitting finale, from watching Hamilton, to courthouse elevators malfunctioning with 12 kids trapped inside, to dressing up in costume as the Greatest Showman for the closing ceremony.
I was the last of the staff to leave SF in the last Empire competition that Empire would host on the West Coast. On a Thursday evening I handed in my keys at the front desk and set off to continue my travels through Europe and North Africa, ringing in the New Year in Dublin on the day the World Health Organisation ‘discovered’ COVID-19.
As the pandemic gripped the globe it became clear that, for the first time in five years, I would not be able to travel to the US for the 2020 season. Instead, Empire would step into the brave new world of online mock trial, thanks largely to the evolution of Viran’s tab software, PROcess. I don’t have the words to describe just how much Viran’s work has changed the mock trial world, but I’m not exaggerating when I say he’s the Nikola Tesla, Satoshi Nakamoto, and Marie Curie of mock trial.
The tournament itself provided a whole new sort of competition management challenge. Our ‘courtrooms’ were Zoom rooms that became virtual black holes. I took on the role of ‘Blue Shirt Lead,’ coordinating a block of 4–6 courtrooms and firefighting issues from disconnecting students to judges who, while lovely, struggled with the Zoom world.
It was the high-pressure, fast-moving environment that I loved, but with a very different view. Jumping between Zoom meetings, Slack windows, and virtual tab rooms required a level of focus that was totally enthralling. I could stand for hours, eyes fixed on the status screens in front of me and diving into courtrooms to fix problems.
I also reprised my role as the Master of Ceremonies, teaming up with my best friend (and one-time teammate) Jodi to deliver the ceremonies remotely from Sydney.
Working with Jodi was great fun in the early days, but the stresses of the season weighed on us both and our relationship became fractured. It took us several months to talk again and smooth things over.
2020 provided a lot of lessons for all of us and while I like to think I got through relatively unscathed, the stresses of the season took their toll on me and I ended the season without the same sense of satisfaction that had followed previous years.
All of that meant that by the time the 2021 season rolled around I was feeling somewhat ambivalent about getting back into Empire. I wonder if I would have approached the competiton with the same enthusiasm if I hadn’t been in lock down for the 3 months leading up to the start. I suspect not.
Either way, the 2021 season kicked off with the opening ceremony live from my bedroom. Instead of studio lights, green screens, and a vastly overqualified producer, I had an old TV and my laptop perched top of a make-shift standing desk on my bed.
From my 8 square meter bedroom in North Sydney, I helped to run a tournament which saw teams from the US, China, South Korea, and Canada compete in the best high school mock trial tournament in the world. It involved going to bed at 3pm and waking up at 11pm to work through two rounds a day until lunch time in Sydney, before going back to bed to rinse and repeat.
Every time I take a moment to pause and reflect on what Empire is and how I got here, I can’t help but shake my head and laugh.
At a several junctures, all that had to happen was for events to play out according to the more probable outcome. It was more probable that I didn’t end up in Ms Mountain’s homeroom group, that United didn’t overbook flights twice when I was interested, and that Justin wouldn’t hire a 20-year-old Australian student to replace a 40-year-old lawyer–SuperMum hybrid from Florida. It was wildly improbable that we would win a 200-team tournament in a sport that is notoriously subjective, that I would be entrusted to MC multiple tournaments, or that I would be even remotely good at any of it.
What are the odds the stars would align this perfectly? At least a trillion to one, by my estimation. It’s looking unlikely that borders will reopen in time to go to Empire Chicago in mid-November, but given everything that’s happened so far, what have the odds got to do with anything? Odds are I’ll see you in Chicago in 6 weeks.
