Championship for Absegami High School!

The Absegami High School mock trial team has secured its place in mock trial history.

On Thursday, Atlantic County Superior Court Judge Steven Perskie said the school will advance to the next round of competition after it edged out Mainland Regional in the final round of competition at the county level.

"We're really proud of the team," Absegami co-adviser Gina Angelozzi  said. "Their hard work and preparation paid off."

It is not known who Absegami will face, or when regionals begin.

The team has been working toward this since auditions were held this past October. They learned the lines and rehearsed regularly until the competition began Jan. 29.

Students Madhuri Swarna and Lauren Block, who played defense attorneys for Absegami, said they are not taking the win for granted. They will continue rehearsing their lines even as they go into regionals.

Louis Pirotta added that he is looking forward to the next round of competition.

"I'm really excited about moving forward and representing Atlantic County," Pirotta said.

Angelozzi said they are waiting to hear when regionals will be held in New Brunswick. She speculated they could know as early as the end of this week. Nonetheless, she and co-adviser Lindsey Costanza are quite pleased about the latest win. Advancing to regionals is the furthest that Absegami has gone, Angelozzi said.

This is the first year that both women are the mock trial team's coaches.

Even though neither Perskie or Judge Joseph Kane knew what two high schools were before them in this final round of competition, Perskie said the decision to pick Absegami over Mainland was not an easy one. 

"The scores were so close," he said.

He could not elaborate how close, how much Absegami won by or what the tallies actually were, but Perskie said the closeness between the final numbers should indicated how well both high schools did in the competition.

"The job you're doing is fabulous," he told them.

He commended the four students who played the attorneys for both schools—Sarah Elanhal and George Papa for Mainland Regional, and Swarna and Block for Absegami.  

“The lawyers were outstanding in preparation and presentation," he said.

The students who were the witness were also good, Perskie said, but quickly pointed out that there were some minor infractions that both sides committed during competition. He personally did not take points off from either high school for using the wrong pronoun.

The fictional case that was used for this year's competition included characters whose names could be either male or female to allow for teams that had either more males than females or vice versa to play the witnesses or the plaintiff and the accused.

As such, as teams advanced from one round to the next, they would need to adjust referring to key players by the right gender depending on the makeup of their next opponent's team.

Judges at the next round of competition will be more stringent than he and Judge Joseph Kane were in residing over this final round of competition, Perskie advised.