Aia wrote:Here's an interesting thought on this team arrangement: suppose a state currently has one team participating at the National level, and this team hopes to crack top ten in order to gain a second team for the state. Now, suppose several other teams in the same state also want to qualify for Nationals. Would rival teams try to help the state-winning team between State and Nationals in order to increase their chances of qualifying for Nationals the following year? Theoretically, this team arrangement could foster collaboration within a state. It wouldn't be too difficult for a rival team to share engineering from a gold medal device, or even share resources for academic events.
I think this type of collaboration is one of the missing points in SO because no one wants to give up their secrets but this is still a good point that I hadn't considered. Basically everyone would be rivals until after States. It would then be better to help each other to try to do everything possible to make the State represetitive team the best possible (to win the extra slots for next year).