New teams (2)

schnelmd · Mon, 05 Nov 2001 13:44:23 -0800

c) It's ideal if you have enough experienced
players to let someone play with the younger teams. When
I was at Vandy, we were lucky to have a deep enough
team that, when I was a freshman, I could play with
experienced players like Chris Sloan, Justin Hasford, and
Todd Lusk. At the same time, we could send Darrell!
and Steve out as our A-team and still have a good
shot at winning any given tournament, which is the
goal of playing and gradually getting better. However,
most teams don't have that sort of depth to spread
around. So, they can usually field one experienced team
with a shot at winning (which is the point of trying
improving through experience/practice/play whatever) and
one inexperienced team (which is likely to lose a
good bit, unless it is lucky enough to have a very
good young player).

 Very new teams don't have
this advantage, of course. It just takes time and
cultivation: the first group has to really struggle to
improve, but then they can then "shelter" younger
players.

 Jr. birds and DII are great, it just requires
that enough teams sign up for them to do run those
tournaments. Serious kudos to Mr. Steinheice and others who
not only hold such tournaments but also actively
recruit young teams/programs to play in them. Of course,
a novice team which doesn't want to play in DII can
always sign up to play DI.

d) About form-factor
questions: don't be dumb with this. Write questions that
don't plagiarize. First, it of dubious legality.
Second, it gives a stupid, non-knowledge based advantage
to player who has read the reference book you are
ripping off. This is not substantive knowledge, and no
questions are supposed to reward non-substantive knowledge.
Questions like this justifiably bother newer teams, since
it isn't related to any material knowledge about the
answer of the question. If you want to reward this sort
of un-knowledge, write questions like "FTP each,
identify the reference book from its description of _Titus
Andronicus_." Might be an amusing quasi-trash
question.

Finally, a brief digression about the high-school thread.
There's a fine line between making questions accessible
and writing those which bore more experienced teams.
Unique clues help, of course, but driving to a
tournament and KNOWING with a pretty high degree of
certainty that there will eventually be a question about
each of Michelangelo, Monet, Gaugin, and Mondrian -
since they are major representatives from a very small
set of "askable" artists is pretty silly. It's even
worse for psychology, philosophy, and other
non-traditional high school subjects. Balancing answerability and
novelty is tough enough in packets aimed at college - and
high school is far, far more difficult.

--Matt
Schneller
Who, for some reason, is wroting this treatise instead
of listening to Property class.