Last Man Standing

The coach of ECC’s Mock Trial Team talks about his team’s storied season

ELGIN, Ill.—Behind the locked doors of a glass trophy case in the halls of Elgin Community College, there stands a small slab of beveled crystal etched with these words: “In Recognition of Outstanding Contributions to Elgin’s Image.”

The Elgin Image Award was bestowed in March by the city’s Image Commission to ECC’s 2009-10 Mock Trial Team. The award is a commemoration of a celebrated team now largely disbanded, a small monument to the accomplishments of a storied season now past.

The tale goes thus: Ragtag band of outsiders from a community college travels to Harvard, faces the titans of the Ivy League and beats Yale, defying all odds. Viewed through the distorting optics of a TV camera lens, or the prisms of a crystal plaque awarded for image, the story presents itself as a tale of David defeating Goliath. The great American myth exemplified.

But as told from the inside, by team coach Ronald Kowalczyk, it’s also a cautionary tale from the dark side of media love, a first-person account of the internal squabbling, petty divisions and all-too-human jealousies that often follow in its wake.

“At first, it was wonderful to be known, and to get the attention, and to have the reporters calling,” Kowalczyk says. “Everyone in the school loved you, everyone in the community loved you, and everyone on the team loved you. But that changed over time. A lot of things changed over time.”

What changed? For one, success and media attention gave rise, seemingly overnight, to heightened scrutiny, ratcheted expectations and internalized pressures, as Kowalczyk tells it. “[Before Harvard] we were the cute little community college team that was just coming along,” he says. “To go from that to being the team that was walking around with a huge target on their back, that everyone at every tournament wanted to beat—that’s a lot of pressure for a 19-, 20-year-old student, or a 60-year-old student, or even for myself. You walk into these tournaments and coaches come right up to you and chide, ‘Where’s your media camera? Where are the news reporters?’ — that happened regularly. We became the hunted.”

Amid that scrutiny, infighting and jealousies emerged. Only nine of the 40 students who wanted to be on the team were selected to compete at Harvard, Kowalczyk points out. Questions were raised about Kowalczyk’s selections: “‘Why wasn’t I on the Harvard team? Why aren’t I a part of this notoriety? Who do they think they are? I’m just as good as they are, and I should have been going to Harvard,’” he recounts. Even within the inner circle, grievances festered, fed by perceived imbalances in the doling out of media attention. “Some people felt that they were more deserving of more media attention than they were getting, and they were being left out. So then you have infighting amongst your A team.”

The reactions of others within the school and the community were no less fraught. “There are a lot of very worthy programs in this school and in this community that deserve all the same attention we got but weren’t getting it,” Kowalczyk says. “So then it’s like, ‘Why are they getting money?’ and ‘Why are they getting attention?’ and ‘What about us?’”

Kowalczyk wonders if the public grew “tired of the Mock Trial Team and of hearing how wonderful the team was.”  He also questions the media’s coverage: “We went to Harvard and got all this publicity, but then we go to the Regionals and we qualify for Nationals, but there’s nothing in the papers about it. There was one article. One. For Harvard, how many were there? It was all over the country. You would think that the media would have continued that story.”

“Notoriety, while initially is a good thing, I think eventually is potentially very dangerous, to me and to the team as a whole. Not just the members of the team, but the ability of the team to continue to function,” Kowalczyk says. “It was difficult to manage that many personalities. When you’re juggling that many people just within your organization, and then the others on the outside — it became very, very difficult at times. Very, very difficult.”

*

Then again, life-as-juggling-act is the norm for Kowalczyk the coach, the professor of Paralegal Studies, the owner of a solo law practice, the one-time triathlete even. By his estimate, he frequently spends 40 hours or more per week, unpaid, coaching the Mock Trial Team — this on top of the many other demands on his time. The seasons are long (7-8 months), the burnout professed. At times, the team’s expenses need subsidization, which Kowalczyk is willing and happy to provide. “Mr. Kowalczyk lives and breathes Mock Trial,” team member Jessica Bianchi says in an email.

It begs the question: What motivates a person toward such levels of sacrifice and devotion?

One clue may lie along the snowy trail he ran one February morning during a blizzard about ten years ago — for “stress relief,” Kowalczyk says in remembering the day he ran the first of the many, many miles to come in his future. That first day’s time was painfully slow: 14 minutes and 30 seconds to complete just one mile. But from that first mile, he went on to run the Chicago Marathon later that same year, then the Boston Marathon, then eventually the Ironman triathlon. “For me it’s the challenge,” Kowalcyzk says. “I haven’t been as active as of late because there really isn’t much to do after the Ironman. So I’m looking for a new challenge. And I think in the last two years, what previously had been fulfilled by my athletic endeavors has now been supplemented by the Mock Trial Team.”

A serial challenge junkie, perhaps?

Or maybe it’s a point of pride for Kowalczyk, who bristles at what he sees as “socioeconomic segregation,” whereby “community college students are viewed as being of a lesser social class than the Ivy League elites” and unfit to compete at the highest levels. Is Mock Trial his opportunity to vindicate the equal worth of students from humble backgrounds that mirror his own? (He is the son of a man with a two-year degree, and the only one in his family to complete higher education at the four-year level.)

Certainly, Kowalczyk had his sights set on Harvard from the start: “[The team] had teased me about Harvard because I talked about it all the time. ‘We need to go to Harvard. We need to compete against Harvard.’” The team’s response was more casual: “‘Yeah, yeah, Ron. Whatever, whatever,’” he recalls. “So it was very satisfying for me to tell them we had gained admittance into the tournament. For me, it was a great accomplishment,” he says. “It was a fairytale come true. Coming from my humble background — and a lot of these students are from the same background — it was like going to Disneyworld, really.”

Whatever drives Kowalczyk, his devotion to the students on his team is unmistakable. “I’m very close with my students, so there are emails, and telephone calls, and text messages all hours of the day and all hours of the night dealing with certain issues,” he says. His generosity, too, is remarkable: “I told [the team], if they make it to the gold round [at Nationals], I would take them all to Paris. I don’t know if that’s proper or improper — I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”

*

So what does the future hold for Kowalczyk and his team? He hopes to compete again at Harvard next season. His aspirations also include a face-off with UCLA, whose Mock Trial team he describes as “phenomenal.” Perhaps even that celebratory team trip to Paris.

But true to form, Kowalczyk is also looking ahead toward the challenges to come. “A number of very, very valuable students from this year’s team who could return next year have, at this point, opted not to return,” Kowalczyk says. “At this point, I know of one student returning. So I’m starting from scratch all over again. I think it’s going to be extremely difficult to have continued success.”

Kowalczyk does not know why those students have opted not to return. “I don’t know if it’s because they’re burnt out, because it’s been a very long season, and whether that drive will come back,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s because the pressure got to be too much.”

But from such pressures are diamonds made. Diamonds-in-the-rough, Kowalczyk says of his most talented students. He believes such jewels are to be found in any community college. “It’s just [a matter of] going out there and finding that diamond-in-the-rough, and spending time with that person, and showing that person that they can compete with the big schools,” he says. He often gushes about his students, using phrases like “she’s so gifted it’s frightening” or “your mind will be blown away — she’s unbelievable.”

“He is our biggest fan,” Team President Eleni Bala says in an email. “He loves what he does, and it shows. He always pushed us to the limit. And every time we reached a goal, he set a higher one.”

That may well be the key to the team’s success thus far. “The great thing about this team is that they’re never satisfied,” Kowalczyk says.

But success as defined by others, or by the media, may elude the team in the years to come. Nevertheless, Kowalczyk does not define the team’s success as a one-off that began and ended on the ivy-laced campus of Harvard during the fall of 2009. “I think the Mock Trial Team would have been a success even without Harvard,” he says. In the world according to Kowalczyk, success comes largely in the form of new opportunities for his students. “I have coaches coming up to me all the time and telling me, ‘We’ve got scholarships available for your students to come to my school. We want this student to come to our school and be on our mock trial team. And this student, and this student.’ Now, we’re almost like a farm team for four-year institutions.”

“Even if the program flopped, if we lost all of our financing, and nothing else happened, and there was no Harvard, there was no nothing — if that one student goes on and gets her four-year degree, that’s an accomplishment. What more do you need? That’s success.”

But Kowalczyk is quick to decline credit for the success. “I’m the figurehead and the captain of this team, but this isn’t my accomplishment. This is really the students’ accomplishment,” he says. “Students come and go, and I’m just the one that’s left. So I don’t know if it’s necessarily that I’m contributing anything or if I’m just the last man left standing.”

Just the last man left standing — Kowalczyk may be modest, but he of all men knows the power of being that last man standing. That’s how tournaments are won. How an Ironman is made. How the trials of life are conquered. Being the last man standing may be lonely. But insignificant? Hardly.