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dxu46 wrote:

yxu08 wrote:

dxu46 wrote:Also, for builds, other teams can copy off your design if you bring a really good device.

As if Ladue didn't copy our gaps for roller coaster

Did I say that we didnt?

Hypocrite

yxu08 wrote:

dxu46 wrote:

yxu08 wrote:
As if Ladue didn't copy our gaps for roller coaster

Did I say that we didnt?

Hypocrite

Lol, ikr, I was wondering why their design looked so familiar...

Hey dxu46, is Ladue planning to host and invitational? My team is looking for nearby invites to attend next year and we would be very interested in going to a Ladue invite.

pajobubo wrote:Hey dxu46, is Ladue planning to host and invitational? My team is looking for nearby invites to attend next year and we would be very interested in going to a Ladue invite.

Haha, no. Maybe in the future, there could be an invitational hosted by Ladue, but the logistics of this would be too hard to handle at the present.

How would knowing which events a team is strong/weak in help other teams? It seems to me that this could only help the team improve their weak areas?

UTF-8 U+6211 U+662F wrote:How would knowing which events a team is strong/weak in help other teams? It seems to me that this could only help the team improve their weak areas?

IMO this would give teams a heads up about what they need to improve on, but I'm not really sure.

That's what invitationals are all about. They let you see how you stand in comparison to other schools so you'll have time to get ready for a bigger competition. For example, if Ladue'd gone to the Smithton competition, they would've seen Wydown's roller coaster earlier, therefore they would've had more time to remodel theirs and have more time to test to see if anything's wrong with it. That could've helped you gone to nationals...

I was never afraid of other teams finding out we were good at an event and working harder to beat us - my school tends to say that if we do at the top few places in an event at invites, we're not that concerned about it, because States is won not by placing 1st in everything but by not placing poorly in anything. One really bad drop hurts a lot more than several 2nd places. So we look for places where we do really poorly and then we improve those, rather than concerning ourselves a lot with how we place relative to our rivals if it's reasonably close.

Otherwise, we have only done 1-day invites in my memory (our furthest one is Yale, which is several hours drive, so we just make everyone get up early). We try to guarantee every team member at least one invitational trip, and then most of the time a bunch of people can't make any given invite so there's only a few people we have to cut, and at that point, if everyone has had the opportunity to go to an invite, we take the people we expect to be our actual competition team to test them out in different combinations. The closer invites are like $20-$40, we try to carpool as much as possible, and the furthest one is like $60. We subsidize the furthest one somewhat with the fees from the closer one.

I haven't been to an invite since I was in Division B, but it was local so everyone just drove there in the morning as if we were going to regionals. I imagine that if we were going to an out-of-state invitational we would drive individually the day before/day of or coordinate some other form of transportation. Additionally, we brought the same team to invitationals and regionals, which explains why I didn't know what stacking was until I joined the forum.

We only have one team, so we can't stack. They did stack B a bit for States since C didn't go, and we had several 9th graders. I was the one that didn't get to...
We usually have a couple of people that arrange for a little carpooling, but we are responsible for getting there on time.