My team is also pretty much student run, and I think favoritism isn't too big a deal - each of the years I've done Science Olympiad, one of our officers hasn't made the States team. Like, we have officers who are sensible enough to say yes I put in a lot of work organising tryouts but other people outperformed me in my events so they should take my spot. We also admitted more people than we can technically take to any of our competitions, so there's competition for States and a Regionals spots but since invites are on weekends, we normally still have more spots than people. I would imagine MIT would be considered more important than any of the invites we go to, but regardless, especially if you go to several invitationals, I would imagine teams have no problem giving everyone a chance to compete and also taking all their top people to their most important competitions.Unome wrote:The impact of favoritism depends on the quality of the captains involved. Teams that do well tend to have next to none of it, and vice-versa with those that don't. Also, favoritism is in no way limited to student-run teams.WhatScience? wrote:But doesn't favoritism inevitably play a part then?alylam wrote: We did some testing as well, but we're mainly student run with our coach having little input on our schedules. I just thought that response was the polar opposite to what MIT was to me since we drove up, don't have a returning Nats team, and have captains rather than coaches who decide the schedule lol.
Also, if it is student run with the purpose of everyone getting to compete at some point in the season, what happens if one of your best at a certain event is not chosen to compete at MIT. MIT is pretty big and getting told that you can't compete even though you are doing the best in a certain event so that everyone gets a chance has go to hurt.
Where did you see anything about people potentially being denied a spot to allow everyone to compete?
Of course I don't speak for Mason, their team might be very different from mine, but I don't see how what they've said of their team format would necessarily be a problem.