"We always scrimmage against Lincoln early on to put us in our place," said Barry Schulman, a teacher coach for the Willow Glen team. In the past 16 years, Lincoln High School's mock-trial team has won seven county and two state championships.

The Willow Glen team used the lessons learned from their scrimmages with Lincoln well. In a match against Burlingame High School, Willow Glen's prosecutors secured the conviction of fictional defendant Madison Casco on counts of theft, grand theft and possession of stolen property. When Willow Glen argued for the defense against Templeton High School, the defendant was acquitted on all three counts.

"I think we did a really good job," said Willow Glen freshman Trace Schaller, who presented the team's opening defense arguments.

Willow Glen was among teams from more than 20 Bay Area high schools who came to the scrimmages to fine-tune their arguments in the fictional court case of People vs. Casco and get feedback from the attorneys and judges before whom they presented their case.

While the trial portion of People vs. Casco deals with a high school student accused of credit-card fraud, the larger issue is whether the search of Madison Casco's backpack that led to the arrest violated the student's constitutional right against unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment.

Attorney Dana Struggs, who presided over Willow Glen's scrimmage against Burlingame, put both sides through their paces during the pretrial hearing. Struggs insisted that Burlingame's defense attorney and Willow Glen prosecutor Madison Slinker cite the case law on which they were basing their arguments. In the end, Struggs dismissed the defense's pretrial motion to exclude $1,000 found in the defendant's backpack from evidence, ruling that the search that led to the money's discovery was reasonable and that the defendant's constitutional rights weren't violated.

"It gives you more to talk about," Struggs said.

Coach Schulman said the pretrial motion is the most difficult part of the case to argue, and it carries the highest scoring potential in competition.

"It also requires a great level of poise on the part of the student because they're presenting in front of a real judge in a real courtroom," Schulman said. "Judges put the pretrial kids through the wringer."

The Santa Clara County Office of Education hosted the scrimmages in preparation for the Santa Clara County championships, which end on March 3. The winning team will move on to the California Mock Trial competition, slated for April 2­4 in Orange County.

Willow Glen's goal is to get to the quarterfinals, Schulman said. "By that time you're down to six teams, and the competition is very tight."

Should Willow Glen make it to the quarterfinals, Schulman said, the team can expect to go up against at least one of the three "superpowers in the county": Lincoln, Lynbrook and Palo Alto high schools.

At practice last week, Willow Glen team members were dissecting their scrimmages and trying to strengthen the weak points of their cases and presentations.

"We learned a lot about what we have to work on," Schaller said. "I'm really not good at objections."

"Every time we practice against another team, we learn a lot," said senior Annel Morales. "Sometimes it's good not to win because it shows us our weaknesses."

Schaller said Willow Glen's weaknesses were revealed during the team's scrimmage against Lincoln. "They totally dominated us. They're a really good team. They have all their notes memorized."

Schulman said opinions as to Madison Casco's guilt or innocence "change every other week. The first time we read the case, we thought there was no way you could convict this person. The further in we got, we found plenty of reasons to convict. These cases are always laid out so they can go either way."

Mock-trial lawyers must work to find different angles to the case, Schulman said. "You have to prepare and know where you're going and what you're going to do, but you have to be able to shift. It's like being in a play and only having half the script."

Schaller said he joined the mock-trial team for the drama of the courtroom. "I'm really into the law, and I'm also really into acting," he added. "Mock trial is the perfect combination of the two."

Morales said the experience has her thinking about a legal career. "Because of the mock trial, when I do a school presentation, I can be more eloquent," she added. "I'm not as frightened to get up in front of a class and talk. What I think is most interesting is that you learn about your rights and how to compose yourself."

The mock-trial program is unique, Schulman said, in that it teaches students both jurisprudence and social prudence.

"Students always grow in this setting," he added. "You can measure that by whether they come back the next year. Of all high school activities, this is clearly the most intellectually challenging."

The California Mock Trial program was introduced in 1980 by the Los Angeles­based Constitutional Rights Foundation, which each year develops a case based on an issue of importance to American youth. More than 8,000 high school students in 36 counties participate in the program, acting as prosecutors, defense attorneys and witnesses in the case.

The Constitutional Rights Foundation provides mock-trial teams with all the information about the case, including witness testimonies and pertinent case law. Teams may not use any other sources of information in compiling their cases.