The club earned six wins and four awards at Regionals, and had a win at the Opening Round Championships, despite some unexpected weather.
By Cara Nixon
March 26, 2026
Reed’s Mock Trial team faced fierce competition and even an unexpected blizzard at this year’s Regional and Opening Round Championship tournaments—and still managed to take home some wins.
This year’s Regionals, hosted in February in Seattle, Washington, marked a series of landmark accomplishments for the club. The team took home a bid to the championship series with six wins, two All-Regionals Witness awards, and two All-Regionals Attorney awards.
“We are an uncoached and entirely student-run program, so to place in the top five out of 24 competing teams is an incredibly vindicating moment for those of us who have now been working for multiple years to build our program from the ground up,” says Mock Trial Vice President Katherine Lamont ’27.
The team’s success at Regionals meant, for the first time since 2023, they were able to go onto Opening Round Championships—and with only two weeks to prepare. ORCS, hosted in St. Paul, Minnesota, in mid March, went differently than planned when a massive Midwestern blizzard forced the entire tournament to go virtual.
“Nonetheless, we still managed to have a very fun and highly competitive tournament, with our club President Karter Stanton ’26 taking home an All-National Attorney award!” Katherine says. “We are so thankful to have had the experience and will go into next year striving to meet and beat this year's success.”
Katherine and the team credit Janice Yang, director of student engagement at Reed, with getting them home safely after the blizzard wiped out all of their return flights.
Looking to the future, Katherine says Mock Trial wants to keep growing. “We want to continue to allow as many people as possible to compete while increasing the level that we compete at because, above all, Mock Trial is not only meant to help people build argumentative or performative skills, but also to create these sorts of irreplaceable experiences,” she says.
Their experience on the competition circuit this year was definitely irreplaceable—with unexpected weather, but also well-earned wins, something the club is looking for more of. Katherine says: “As we continue to expand our ability to bring on more people and go to more tournaments, we hope to bolster the foundations for a program that can continue to sustainably compete at the same level as the other elite programs in our circuits and continue to win!”