The team is experiencing a “roller-coaster” season so far, according to senior Hayley Graves.

Head coach Jeanine Boyers, returning after a year of absence, started the season by arranging scrimmages much earlier than before.

Country Day faced Tamalpais High School of Marin County during the first scrimmage in November, a school whose Mock Trial team has won 17 consecutive county champion titles and a national champion title.

However, despite Boyers’s effort to give the team a head start, the team encountered unexpected challenges and problems as the season progressed.

To begin with, the team’s size and members’ variation in experience made it difficult to assign roles, Boyers said.

The team had 23 members in the beginning of the year. The bare minimum required for a team is 12.

Wanting to provide roles for everyone, Boyers and co-coach Sharon Reilly briefly separated the team into two.

However, that solution wasn’t feasible, according to Boyers.

Forming two teams required many members to double up on roles, making every member’s presence at the competition crucial. Being one person short at the last minute would have forced the entire team to forfeit.

Besides the fact that the team is now down to 19 members, “students just aren’t doing the work,” Boyers said.

While big-school teams such as Elk Grove practice at least five times a week, Country Day students meet only three to four hours every Sunday.

On top of that, many students often struggle to attend practices, because they already parti­cipate in numerous other activities. Students are not able to practice as a team, and this affects the team “immensely,” Boyers said.

“Our kids really have to step it up,” she said. “They are really at a disadvantage.”

Students weren’t able to put enough effort into learning their roles, res­ulting in constant role changing that delayed the overall progress of the team, according to Boyers.

“(Mock Trial) is all about work,” Boyers said. “I don’t care how much potential you have. You have to practice.”

Therefore, Boyers has decided not to divide the team, which means some members will participate as understudies, learning and preparing for next year.

However, the role changing continues and has caused significant frustration for some members, according to junior Jianna Gudebski.

For Gudebski, the annoying part was how she learned everything about one role, but then it was quickly taken away from her when she received a new role.

Graves agrees. “It’s hard to keep up with the sudden changes,” she said. “It takes the fun out of (Mock Trial), making it very stressful.”

Another conflict sprang up when some found out about their newly given roles.

According to Boyers, she made one rule very clear in the beginning of the year: Students were required to attend the Mock Trial retreat, held at junior Jeffrey Caves’s house on Jan. 21-22.

“If you don’t come to the retreat, you won’t be guaranteed a role,” Boyers said.

Several upperclassmen did not adhere to that rule, and some became upset when they did not receive their preferred roles or any at all.

Graves has almost always been the opening attorney, she said. However, she missed the day of the retreat because she flew to Chicago for a college interview.

When she returned, she was informed that she did not have a role.

“(The coaches) said I wasn’t committed enough,” Graves said. “I don’t think (missing the retreat) is enough to de-role someone.”

After sitting out for the most recent scrimmage against Ponderosa High School on Feb. 3, Graves is now the defendant instead of an attorney.

“In order for the team to perform well, the defendant has to be likeable, and more importantly, believable,” Boyers said. “We have tried it with several students and are hoping that this change will work.”

According to Graves, she has never had a defendant role, so this will be new and fun for her. But still, after being on the team for three years, Graves would have preferred a more challenging role.

Gudebski did not miss the retreat and originally received the role as the defendant. But after the latest scrimmage, she was switched to a defense witness.

While Gudebski agreed that role switchings were necessary and Boyers was right about students not putting in their best effort, she also felt that “it’s not fair.”

“(Boyers) had told us that the roles were set in stone,” she said.

Junior Cooper Jackman recently quit the team. Jackman also did not attend the retreat and did not receive a role. He tried out for a witness role in the last scrimmage, but didn’t get it. Instead, he received the role of bailiff for the third time in three years.

However, Jackman did not quit the team just because he received a small role.

“I felt like good decisions weren’t being made,” he said.

Boyers, however, described Jackman’s situation as one of the inevitable ones in Mock Trial.

According to Boyers, Jackman has been working incredibly hard, but the witness role was simply not right for him. Boyers believed Jackman would be a good middle attorney, but there are five other candidates for that role.

Boyers describes the process of assigning roles as solving a Rubik’s cube. Not only do the students have to know their roles, they also have to know how their parts relate to the case as a whole. Students have to be likeable during competitions to earn the most points possible, and the students’ interaction with other students is crucial.

“You have to have it all,” Boyers said.

Boyers understands that students work very hard and that they get frustrated about role changing, but during scrimmages, “you can see the holes that need to be filled,” she said.

Boyers also needed students to go beyond in-class work to do more outside work.

“It’s not enough to just sit in your bedroom and write what you are asked to do,” she said.

Despite all the problems the team has faced, students have started to come together, Boyers said. She feels that the team has gotten past the drama, and “the team as a whole is working really well.”

“The retreat was really the turning point,” she said. “Everyone understands the purpose and goal, and we are just fine-tuning (the details) now.”

And the improvement was obvious in the scrimmage against Ponderosa on Feb. 3.

Although Boyers feels like Country Day did not get the most out of the scrimmage because of Ponderosa’s imcomplete team, she was content with the performance of the team, specifically of seniors Blair Wigney, Trevor Sutley and team captain Adam Pinson.

The team will head to the final competition on Thursday, Feb. 16.

Over the last six years, Country Day has taken fourth, third and second place at the competition.