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To the best of my knowledge...stacking is sending your best team...unstacking is splitting up your best members

Why does it make sense to do this?

Teams stack for important tournaments (states/nats/sometimes regionals) so that they can do their best and achieve their best possible result.

Teams unstack (invitationals mostly/sometimes regionals) so that newer members and inexperienced members can gain experience in their events and hopefully get better at them.

Unstacked teams (more often called "split teams") also helps evaluate various partner combinations, which makes it easier to see how people are individually, and how much they contribute to the team. This is especially true for teams that go to many invitationals - for example, this years Solon will likely send unstacked teams (or not-fully-stacked teams) to each of their 9 invitationals and regionals, before stacking for state and nationals.

Unome wrote:Unstacked teams (more often called "split teams") also helps evaluate various partner combinations, which makes it easier to see how people are individually, and how much they contribute to the team. This is especially true for teams that go to many invitationals - for example, this years Solon will likely send unstacked teams (or not-fully-stacked teams) to each of their 9 invitationals and regionals, before stacking for state and nationals.

This is accurate

There are all sorts of purposes to unstacking other than partner experimentation. Sometimes, it maximizes participation or masks the stacked roster. It's, also, fun to scramble pairs! Given some niche-skill events, some pairs can be stucl together for eons in a totally stacked environment; that's not very fun (depending on who it is, of course).

We usually go unstacked to also try to minimize one team feeling inferior to another. If both teams feel as if they have a chance, odds are they'll do the best they can rather than only one putting in full effort. To reiterate the above, it also is much more fun

I've seen some people on the forums "manually stack" teams based on their competition results, but how do you do that? Do you just combine the scores to predict how that school would do as a stacked team?

venules wrote:I've seen some people on the forums "manually stack" teams based on their competition results, but how do you do that? Do you just combine the scores to predict how that school would do as a stacked team?

The typical method is to take the highest rank in each event from among a school's multiple teams. This is generally used as exactly that, an estimate of how the team would do if stacked - although it generally will underestimate scores for events with two even places (e.g. two competitors getting 7th and 9th independently, but good enough for top 3 when on the same team) and will overestimate in other places since it compensates for bombs (whereas an actually stacked team is more likely to bomb).

Is stacking useful if a team only goes for 3-4 invitationals per season?

Or sorry, I meant unstacking! Because wouldn't it be harder to evaluate different partner combinations with fewer invitationals?

Also, how would you switch up the partner combinations? If there are two teams, would you randomly pair up the top four people from tryouts for each event? Or would you put the best person with the 3rd best, and 2nd best with 4th best, or some other pattern?