<<True, but GT was a special case last year. One of our players, a very integral player, unfortunately lost a family member the morning of the tournament and obviously couldn't attend. We had to plead our case to NAQT, and were one of the last teams invited.>> You may have plead your case, but no pleading was actually needed as your invitation came in the normal course of the process--albeit in "Stage 2" due to your CCT championship, not through SCT performance. Looking back on my notes on last year's invitations, the original D1 field size was going to be 40 (later expanded to 42). 15 teams qualified automatically as SCT champs or undergrad champs, and four hosts additionally opted for a D1 slot. 17 teams were then given invitations based on SCT performance, to reach 36 teams, or 90% of the targeted 40. Then last year we had reserved three spots for British teams, bringing invites to 39. The final of the original 40 invitations then went to Georgia Tech, as a CCT champ not yet invited. Texas A&M was also in this category, but Georgia Tech's CCT title came in a larger field, so they got the first nod. Then we expanded to 42, for reasons I forget, which let in Texas A&M and Johns Hopkins, which was a CCT 2nd-place team. Seven of these 42 original invitees either declined, or first accepted and then later declined, so we wound up going well into the waitlist. Thanks to the late withdrawals, always an unfortunate thing, some of those offers to waitlisted teams came too late to allow teams who would have accepted earlier to make affordable travel arrangements, and couldn't be accepted when the offers finally came. In the end, I think offers were made, at least technically, to fully 19 waitlisted teams in order to make up the seven original invitations that were eventually declined. In the end, we took two teams originally registering as standby, and had 41 in the tournament. In contrast to Division 1, the Division 2 waitlist last year was untouched. We wanted 24 teams, but after the original 24 were invited we immediately invited two more that should have been in the first 24 but weren't, due to a statistical problem not discovered until after the original list was announced. We figured that after two teams declined, we'd stick at 24, and not go to the waitlist until a 3rd team declined. However, of the 26 teams given invitations, in the end 25 accepted, so we wound up going with 26, replacing the only team declining, Kentucky, with De Pauw, which had started out 2nd on a waitlist that had no movement, but had then agreed to come to Boston in any case as a standby team. And now I've gone rather far afield from commenting on the invitation to GT last year on the basis of CCT rather than SCT performance, but on the eve of the inevitable anxieties about the initial list of ICT invitations I found it interesting myself to remember what happened with the waitlists last year, and how very different the situation wound up being in that respect in the different divisions. Eric H.
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