Our program has a variety of coaches. We have our head coach who is now an attorney, was a former mocker, and is a full time paid staff member of our university (Hamline). Then we have several attorney coaches, which are local attorneys who come and help us out, many of whom have been involved with mock trial for a long time and some of whom did mock trial during undergrad.
We also have several law students who did mock when they were undergrads who come and help us, one in particular on an almost daily basis. Finally, we have some former mockers who are not in law school who come back to help us from time to time when we ask for them.
Often when we do scrimmages, we like to get judges other than the 3 or 4 people that frequently see our teams rounds and performances, so that we can get outside critique.
When we go to tournaments, we generally try to bring as many people as we can with us, so that we can meet judging requirements if necessary, and we can also have coaches available to watch both sides of the case for both of our teams.
We have a strong core of our 4 main coaches - our head coach, two attorney coaches, and one law student/former mocker coach. At least 2 or 3 of them are at almost every one of our scheduled practices, and most if not all of them come to every one of our tournaments.
For example this last sunday we had a sort-of-scrimmage. I say sort-of because it was scheduled and supposed to be a scrimmage in full dress and whatnot, but half of both teams ended up being sick, so we just did what we could. But for judges we had two of our regular coaches, and two outsiders who had never seen our case before.
I tend to think getting a variety of opinions from people at all levels of the mock trial world, and real world is extremely helpful to making teams stronger, because they notice different things, which I think really helps to make our teams stronger.
