After school ends, there are sports, there are jobs and, for the two dozen students who make it in, there is mock trial.

In the Butler School District, the team is among the most serious of extracurricular activities. Team members practice incessantly, and coaches drill them daily in preparation for the coming competitions.

They are, after all, defending champions.

Butler's mock trial team is fresh off winning the countywide tournament for its 11th year straight. Despite all the hours already spent practicing, students and coaches say they're now getting really serious. The district tournament soon approaches.

Mocking-Up A Trial

David Cooper, a history teacher who coaches the team, said he sees his students grow each year from weepy messes to courtroom commanders. Much of that process is trial by fire.

“If they ask you that, you should slam it back in their faces,” Cooper said, waving a stack of fake affidavits toward Eliza Drohan, a 17-year-old senior.

Eliza, he said, needs to be louder, and she needs to talk more like a police officer: confident, concise and a little cocky. She's a witness for the prosecution, a hardened officer from Chicago with a score to settle. She's no longer a kind high schooler from Butler.

“It can be a little embarrassing sometimes,” Eliza said. “You're supposed to know your character so well. But it prepares you for the unknown.”

Every mock trial team statewide works the same case each year. The Pennsylvania Bar Association sends out a stack of documents about the case. It's fake, but based on current legal trends and real cases.

This year's is a criminal case about a doctor accused of failing to practice discretion when prescribing opioids, leading to a patient's death.

In Butler County, there are teams at the Butler, Freeport, Moniteau and Seneca Valley school districts. North Catholic High School also has a team.

Butler students won the county tournament during the first week of February. Once Beaver County finishes its tournament this week, students will meet their rivals at district finals soon afterward.

Each team is randomly assigned the prosecution or defense. They try the case, question witnesses and call out objections. A judge acts as referee, and a panel of attorneys acts as a jury. Winning the case can help, but the round's actual winner is whoever scores the most points.

Eliza thinks they'll be ready.

Girl Power

Butler runs two teams each year, varsity and junior varsity. This year's varsity team is 10 girls and one boy. The prosecution team is all young women.

“It's exciting to be able to present an all-female case,” Eliza said. “Most of the time, we see all the attorneys are usually male.”

The gender disparities Eliza sees aren't unique to high school courtrooms. Only about 35 percent of practicing lawyers in the United States are women, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women only hold lucrative general counsel positions for Fortune 500 companies about 26 percent of the time, according to the American Bar Association.

Caroline Simms, an 18-year-old senior, said she faced a team with only boys playing the witness roles. It threw her off, she said, as girls always seem to play witnesses. In trials, boys sometimes appear to play by different standards.

“Guys can be very dramatic,” Simms said. “People like that from guys. You get points for good character as a witness, and it can be hard for me to have that character.”

The team has a woman role model, and every team in the state has an attorney sponsor. Butler's is Gerri Paulisick, a family law attorney in Butler. Her daughter, Chloe, is one of the team's stars.

Paulisick confirmed: “There's a bit of female empowerment going on this year.”

She and Cooper, she said, aim to teach young women the skills they need to break the paradigm. Public speaking, critical thinking and improvisation are all essential for a developing mock trial protégé.

“My first year, a freshman girl came in and cried through her entire audition,” Paulisick said. “She couldn't do it. We put her in because we thought she needed these skills. Her senior year, she won the star witness award.”

Wisawe, Pa.

Pennsylvania mock trial cases always seem to be set in a fictional town known as Wisawe. The authors are “Philadelphia boys,” Cooper said, and often they're cracking jokes at rural and Western Pennsylvania's expense. Their Philly bias often shows.

“Anytime they have a sort of upper crust character, they're always from Bethel Park,” Cooper said. “I'm like, 'Really? Bethel Park?'”

There's a college in Wisawe that comes up in several years' cases, explained Braden Pate, an 18-year-old senior, the varsity team's only male member.

“I like to think of Wisawe as Butler, to be honest,” Pate said. “I think of it as Butler, but Carnegie Mellon is BC3.”

The lore builds each year. Old criminals are mentioned in new cases. Prominent community figures crop up repeatedly.

The teams build their own traditions, too. On the bus ride home from competitions, Paulisick conducts an award ceremony known as “the Mockies.”

Every tournament, one student always admits that their client killed someone, Paulisick said.

Sam Thoma, a 16-year-old junior, is one of the team's biggest character actors. She tries to tap into her judges' senses of humor.

“These people are lawyers,” she said. “They work all day, then they have to sit through another trial of teenagers acting. I want to keep them entertained.”

Serious Business

Despite all the fun, the Butler students take their cases seriously.

Witnesses are expected to memorize their affidavits, but not their actual speeches. They have to answer questions in character, and don't want to risk being thrown off guard by a question they haven't rehearsed.

A few weekends a year, teams will gather in their homes for extra practices. Emily Grecco, a long-term substitute who helps the team, said she has spotted team members sneaking in extra practice time during school hours.

“I've seen multiple students come in during their study hall to practice in the library,” she said.

Cooper has students record the prepared parts of their cases and pour over them for potential improvements.

“He's intense,” Grecco said of Cooper. “Very intense. I've seen him in the classroom setting, and he brings the same funny sarcasm with him to this.”

Paulisick said the team might not exist if not for Cooper, who took over when a previous teacher left the district.

“He stepped up,” she said. “It was way out of his comfort zone, and he's worked his tail off.”

Cooper leads a team that has made a name for itself. Steven Casker, an attorney who coordinates Butler County's tournament, described the team as “a powerhouse.”

“Butler has been the team to beat for years,” Casker said.

With 11 county-level wins under its belt, the team these days looks hungrily to state. Only once in the past decade did it bypass the district tournament. One or another Beaver County team always shuts Butler out.

The district finals should be in the next few weeks, with an exact date pending the end of Beaver's tournament.

Maybe this is Butler's year.