Moot Court: 6 PHC teams march onward to nationals

Six PHC moot court teams received a bid to nationals two weeks ago after they participated in three separate tournaments—one in Houston, one in Memphis, and one in Lexington.

The Houston tournament proceeded as normal. Two PHC teams attended. Junior Ben Arroyave and sophomore Haley Bock received a bid to nationals, despite some difficult rounds.  However, one recent moot court tournament did not go quite as planned.  

Bock received first speaker overall, sophomore Caleb Helsing received second, and sophomore Rebecca Phillips received 12th.  

“I didn’t place [in the] top 15, but it was really cool to see PHC just do so well,” Arroyave said.

The tournament in Memphis was anything but expected.  

Four PHC teams flew down the night before. When they arrived at their hotel, they received a notification that the University of Memphis Law School, where the tournament was taking place, was shutting down the next day due to a snowstorm.  

“We’re all walking in very dejected silence to dinner, and I’m just thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, this is gonna be the last thing I ever do with moot. It’ll be a Zoom tournament,’” senior Sarah Fox said.  

The competitors worried that the hotel Wi-Fi might not support Zoom, especially because multiple schools would also be competing from the same hotel.  

“We tested it the night before, and miraculously it was better than it is at PHC,” Fox said.  

Sophomore Allie Satterfield and her moot court partner, sophomore Wyatt Trull, competed while Trull’s mom watched their rounds.

During the second preliminary round, Fox and her moot court partner, senior Trinity Klomparens, experienced a major technical difficulty. Klomparens explained to their judge that she and Fox would time their opponents so he would not need to.  

“So then she starts sharing her screen for the timer, and then her computer—the Wi-Fi—glitches,” Fox said. Fox frantically pulled up the timer and allowed Klomparens to share her computer.

Fox and Klomparens took first place in the Memphis tournament. Two other teams, Satterfield-Trull and Mark Epstein-James Staub, also received bids to nationals.  

“I didn’t really go in thinking, 'Oh, we will win this tournament.' It just felt like, 'Oh my goodness, this is such a sweet gift,'” Fox said.  

After the Memphis round, two more teams competed in Lexington, KY. Team Jason Chahyadi and Ainsley Stellman and team Zeke Johnson and Abigail Spivey both earned bids to Nationals!

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Patrick Henry College challenges the unacceptable status quo in higher education by combining the academic strength and commitment to biblical principles that elite institutions have lost; a commitment to high academic rigor, fidelity to the spirit of the American founding, and an unwavering biblical worldview.