As Carmel’s ComedySportz team trains for the upcoming season, the team has transitioned into playing mock matches in order to be ready by the time the opening game comes around.

Kate Urbanowski, junior and ComedySportz member, was a first-year member of the team last year and said that she didn’t know what exactly to expect.

“I remember last year I had never seen a match before and so I was totally new to the concept,” she said.

This year, though, Urbanowski said the mock matches are giving new members the experience they need.

“The mock match is to give the ‘noobs,’ what we call (first-year members), a mindset of how the match is,” Urbanowski said. “We all need to know the format of a match and be able to know what’s coming next in our heads.”

ComedySportz sponsor Jim Peterson explained further.

“Just getting the feel for what it’s like to go through a match and to know what’s expected of you,” he said, is what makes mock matches so important. “It’s pretty much, we’re just learning and building and rehearsing.”

According to Urbanowski, the team is getting close to taking the next step.

“Once they know how to play the games and the format of the match, then we can work on our teamwork together and how we work together in a match and all of the chemistry onstage,” Urbanowski said. “So far, the noobs have been learning very well, which is very impressive, and they’ll continue to learn and hopefully we’ll be just as great as we were last year.”