Stanford Mock Trial competed in the Pacific Northwest Regional Tournament last weekend, coming home with three individual awards and one second place trophy.

The group sent three teams to the tournament — which was held at the University of Oregon in Eugene — and the squad that placed second finished high enough to earn a bid to the national championships, to be held in Florida this April.

Twenty-two teams, including squads from UC-Berkeley and Gonzaga University, participated in last weekend’s contest. A team from Cal won the tournament and will accompany the runner-up Stanford team to this spring’s nationals.

The team’s leaders were pleased with the squad’s performance.

“We have a great program this year, and I was really pleased overall with how everyone did at the tournament,” said Betsy Walls ‘08, a team captain.

The group is young this year; in fact, one of the three Stanford teams at the regional tournament consisted entirely of freshmen and sophomores, and the other two squads had only two upperclassmen each.

Mock Trial president John Fowler ‘07 cited the team’s youth as a mark of future success for the team.

“We have a young team which is great for the future,” he said.

Walls said she was thrilled to be sending a team to Florida, but also said she was happy to see all the teams remain competitive.

“We were really excited to take second because that means we get a bid to the national championships,” she said. “We always prefer to have all of our teams place in the top but I think all of the teams felt that they had performed well.”

In addition to the team awards, three team members earned individual accolades in Eugene. Fowler walked away with an All-Region Attorney nod, while Vicky Degtyareva ‘08 (a columnist for The Daily) and Chibuzo Eke ‘09 were awarded All-Region Witness honors.

Mock Trial participants cited the importance of flexibility in determining a team’s success.

“I’d say my goal was to learn to do something new and learn how to manage something that I wasn’t used to,” said Monica Mueller ‘09. Mueller switched from being a lawyer to playing a witness.

The National Championships will be held at Stetson University Law School in St. Petersberg, Fla. on Apr. 13-15.