Random Wednesday Morning Thought and Building the FanShot Highlight Bank

. . . I was working with Luella, a Henry County high school which competes in the McDonough Region. Jonesboro, from neighboring Clayton County, competes in the Jonesboro Region.

(Full disclosure: I have lived in Henry County for nearly eight years, but I grew up in Clayton County, where my office still is located. I attended Morrow High School, a football rival of Jonesboro’s, but I graduated the year before my high school government teacher, Peggy Caldwell, helped to start the Georgia mock trial program, although I participated in the mock trials she conducted in her government classes. My wife teaches at Starr’s Mill, which also competes in the McDonough Region, and she was a teacher-coach there prior to the birth of our first child.)

The lead attorney-coach at Jonesboro is Judge John Carbo of the Clayton County State Court, whom I routinely see at South Metro Bulldog Club meetings and with whom my father served in local civic organizations when I was in high school.

In short, no, Jonesboro isn’t the team with which I worked, but I have ties to the community and the attorneys who have helped to produce not just a championship team but a championship program. (In addition to winning back-to-back national championships in 2007 and 2008, Jonesboro has won six state championships since 1988, including five in the last seven years. That would be impressive even if the Empire State of the South was not one of the most accomplished producers of high school mock trial talent in the country, but Georgia schools have claimed a combined four national championships, including three in the last decade.)

Jonesboro, like such other perennial mock trial standout schools as Columbus’s Brookstone School, Snellville’s South Gwinnett High School, and Athens’s own Clarke Central High School, is not my team, but I root for the Georgia state mock trial champion at the national competition for the same reason I root for S.E.C. teams in bowl games.

I know that’s more than you wanted to know, but I appreciated your asking. The caliber of the young people who participate in the Georgia high school mock trial program truly is outstanding and, after serving as an evaluator at the 2007 McDonough Regional and as an attorney-coach this past school year, I honestly can say that any lawyer who works with a high school mock trial team will leave the regional competition feeling better about his choice of profession than he did when he arrived.