New Champion of Ohio High School Mock Trial Competition

By Stephanie Beougher - March 11, 2014

Sylvania Southview High School took home the trophy March 8 at the Ohio High School Mock Trial State Finals.

In the competition at the Ohio Statehouse, the Lucas County school went up against Orange High School from Pepper Pike in Cuyahoga County in a simulated trial before a panel of judges. Sylvania Southview senior Yuran Chen was named by the judges as the outstanding attorney for the final competition.

"It feels good that we can represent our school this way," Chen said after the competition. "We've been working for a couple of hours a night per week every single day after school we'd go to our coaches house and work so this is just like a culmination of all of that work."

This is the sixth time a team from Sylvania Southview has won, but the first in 10 years.

The 31st annual state final competition started with about 300 high school students from 30 teams from across Ohio. Ohio Mock Trial is a program of the Ohio Center for Law-Related Education and is Ohio's largest high school academic competition, with more than 35-hundred students participating every year.

The goals of the program include helping students understand constitutional rights and responsibilities. This year's case analyzed student rights under the First and Fourth Amendments related to freedom of expression and unreasonable search and seizure.

Sylvania Southview will represent Ohio at the National High School Mock Trial Championship this May in Madison, Wisconsin.

A video of the final competition is available online.