From the Desk of Neal Schuett: The Best Time of the Year
Last week, Miami Mock Trial published our auditions and callbacks process for the 2020-2021 academic year. This week, we invited our head coach and executive director, Neal Schuett, to share some words of wisdom for those interested in auditioning for Miami Mock Trial this fall.
It’s my favorite time of year; it’s when we get to meet the newest members of The Legacy and Miami Mock Trial (MMT). If you found this blog, then you are at least considering joining MMT. I strongly encourage that you take a look around the blog and read all of the posts by our members and alumni. We have a really good thing going here and would love to add you to the mix!
MMT is one of the nation’s premier mock trial programs. Now, I know everyone claims to be the “best in town” but we really are! Our list of awards is long and the accomplishments of our members/alums is impressive. But if you want to hear more about that read the blog posts and come to our informational meeting.
I’m here to talk about how you can join our organization. You will need to tryout because we have a limited number of competitive spots we can offer. Now, if you just thought, “well I have no mock trial experience, so I guess I am out of luck,” you’re wrong! Prior mock trial experience is not required to tryout or to make the team. Many of our most successful competitors, including national champions, had no prior mock trial experience. We have an amazing coaching staff that can teach you how to do mock trial. You just need to focus on doing well in your tryout.
We only hold tryouts at the start of the school year because our season runs from the start of the year until mid-spring semester. So, you cannot wait until second semester to join; we need to you to tryout at the start of the year.
Given the COVID-19 pandemic, we realize not everyone is going to be in Oxford, at least for the first month, and possibly the entire school year. We have restructured our tryout process to accommodate for the online-only reality of 2020.
Our tryout process will have two parts. First, an online video submitted to the coaching staff to show us your speaking ability. It’ll be short and sweet: five minutes max. So, you will want to make sure you send us something that really highlights your public speaking skills like voice modulation, eye contact (with the camera), volume and pace control, and an engaging topic. We will provide all the details later on how and where to upload your videos. For now, know that you can present anything you want: a monologue, a persuasive speech, something you did in high school drama, speech, or mock trial, etc. The point of the video is for us to be able to assess your baseline public speaking skills. It’s only five minutes, so bring your best stuff!
The second stage of tryouts are callback interviews. From all of the videos we receive, the coaches will select the best performers and then schedule an online interview with those students. Each interview will be less than ten minutes and will be with the coaching staff only. The purpose of the interview is to get to know you. Even though you will have already filled out a short bio, we want to get to know you and make sure we are a good fit. MMT is a demanding sport; it’s like joining the Alabama football team or Duke basketball team of mock trial. Among other skills, it takes a strong work ethic, being open to constructive criticism, and being able to work well with others to succeed in MMT. These interviews are designed to educate the coaches about you and your skill set beyond your prepared video. They’ll be painless; and best of all, it’s about a topic you know well: you!
After callbacks the coaches will decide the final rosters and will notify everyone of our decisions. We hope to have all the tryouts, callbacks, and our decisions done by the evening of August 30th. The first practice with our newest members of The Legacy will be August 31st via an online conferencing app.
Don’t be discouraged by the fact that you have to tryout or that it’s a two-step process. We commonly hear from students that decided to tryout after a year or two of being too afraid to tryout that they were very glad that they finally applied. Many of those students have earned their way onto the team and find themselves wishing they had tried out earlier so that they had more time with us! In other words, tryout; you won’t regret it!
I look forward to meeting all of you (from a proper social distance, of course) very soon.
To find out more about our audition process or to sign up for more information, click here.