Sylvania Southview High School placed third in the National Mock Trial Competition. Ohio’s 2014 Mock Trial state champions became the first Ohio school in more than two decades to place in the top ten at the national level.

The Lucas County students represented both the plaintiff and defendant side in a fictional civil action case during a three-day competition that ended May 10. The Sylvania Southview students won four rounds before losing a tie-breaker round to reach the finals.

At the state competition on March 8, Sylvania Southview senior Yuran Chen was named by the judges as the outstanding attorney of the mock trial. He said the team was excited to represent Ohio at the national level.

“It feels good that we can represent our school this way,” Chen said after the state competition. “We’ve been working for a couple of hours a night per week every single day after school we’d go to our coaches house and work so this is just like a culmination of all of that work.”

The 31st annual Ohio Mock Trial competition started with about 300 high school students from 30 teams from across the Buckeye state. Ohio Mock Trial is a program of the Ohio Center for Law-Related Education and is Ohio’s largest high school academic competition, with more than 35-hundred students participating every year.