SO tryouts?

[amerikestrel]

How do other teams do their tryouts? I'm asking because our's is pretty messed up and not very effective. Do you have individual tryouts for each event?

[EpicFailOlympian]

You mean invitationals? In my school everyone tests on what events they want to do and the best gets to be on the team.

[brobo]

At the beginning of the year we just pick events we want to do- both the A and B teams. Then at invitationals, we do whatever events we do. If theres a conflict, then someone else takes it for just that tournament. Then we look at how everybody did for each event, and have "face-offs" where necessary. Usually its just a practice test proctored by the coaches. That, plus arrangement of A and B teams (which really blend together at this point) decides events for Regionals. Then the A and B teams combine to create the State team, and the events that you are best at are your events.

Thats how our school works. I assume that this is a popular system, though.

[zyzzyva980]

We were lucky to get 15 team members this year. Hence, no tryouts. Invitationals are usually our tryouts- we had 17 people sign up, so we only had to narrow it down a little bit.

[Celeste]

We have a sort of mini-meet near the beginning of the school year with everyone from our school who is interested. We then form A and B teams based off of that.

[brobo]

The State team from one year becomes the A team the next, then we have a meeting for all 6/7th graders who are interested to explain what Sci Oly is. Then if they are still interested, they take a test, and the top 15 people are in. The A team starts studying over the summer, started with the release of the list of events... in fact, I should probably email my coach that list I found.

[FueL]

We're allowed three teams for regionals, A, B, and C, with A being the varsity team. This year, we didn't go to invitationals, but our coaches tried a new way of determining placements where they would give us 15 minutes to take a very long (anywhere from 40~90 question) test on our event, and whoever performed the best on that would make it to varsity. For building, they just looked over the builds people had so far and put the best ones on the varsity team.

[Deeisenberg]

We have no tryouts. Those who want to join the team join with no cap on membership. The competing team is determined by the schedule and who is best at what at the given time (among other more subtle factors, i.e. which two people know the most combined if they know much the same thing, that would not be good).

[AlphaTauri]

For us, everyone interested shows up at a meeting at the beginning of the year, and we take a test on a selection of event topics. The 15 people who do the best are on the team, and the next 5 are alternates. We have had alternates promoted to full team members when people quit or can't make it to competition, but I don't think we've ever had anyone get kicked off the team (we've had several people get close, but no one actually kicked off).

[walkingstyx]

We do it the same way as Deeisenberg, and bring everyone and don't stack anything at invitationals. Before regionals, we have a test off and use that and invitational results to figure out the best team for regionals, though we still bring everyone else and if some one beats the A-Team, we usually move them up. Our state and national teams are the same.
We didn't use test offs in the past, but we needed a way to distinguish which of two partners was better, so we added it two seasons ago.
We haven't ever really kicked someone off the team, though we did once lose a team member the night before nationals.