Texas 2019

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Re: Texas 2019

Post by Riptide »

I don’t know how well run other state’s regional tournaments are, but one of the other benefits of having open regionals is that teams can choose to go to well run regionals. Many regionals in Texas don’t even run 23 events (our regional ran 21 out of 27 events), and the tests at most regionals are very basic and not challenging. Although it’s impossible to tell without going to all regionals, the UT regional is run much better than all other regionals, and in my biased opinion the Katy Regional is probably one of the better regionals. Someone said earlier that a problem with open regionals is dominant teams will go to easier regionals and give other teams no chance, but Texas helps prevent this by giving the team(s) that attend nationals the year before admittance to state automatically. Their placing is not considered at regional tournaments when deciding how many teams from that regional attend state.
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Re: Texas 2019

Post by jaggie34 »

Riptide wrote:I don’t know how well run other state’s regional tournaments are, but one of the other benefits of having open regionals is that teams can choose to go to well run regionals. Many regionals in Texas don’t even run 23 events (our regional ran 21 out of 27 events), and the tests at most regionals are very basic and not challenging. Although it’s impossible to tell without going to all regionals, the UT regional is run much better than all other regionals, and in my biased opinion the Katy Regional is probably one of the better regionals. Someone said earlier that a problem with open regionals is dominant teams will go to easier regionals and give other teams no chance, but Texas helps prevent this by giving the team(s) that attend nationals the year before admittance to state automatically. Their placing is not considered at regional tournaments when deciding how many teams from that regional attend state.
In florida most regionals aren't great either, usually all 23 event are run but the tests are usually low quality and things can be disorganized. One exception I know of us the UF regionals which is usually run well with tests that are checked by Science Olympiad Alumni to make sure things are well-written
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Re: Texas 2019

Post by cool hand luke »

Riptide wrote:I don’t know how well run other state’s regional tournaments are, but one of the other benefits of having open regionals is that teams can choose to go to well run regionals. Many regionals in Texas don’t even run 23 events (our regional ran 21 out of 27 events), and the tests at most regionals are very basic and not challenging. Although it’s impossible to tell without going to all regionals, the UT regional is run much better than all other regionals, and in my biased opinion the Katy Regional is probably one of the better regionals. Someone said earlier that a problem with open regionals is dominant teams will go to easier regionals and give other teams no chance, but Texas helps prevent this by giving the team(s) that attend nationals the year before admittance to state automatically. Their placing is not considered at regional tournaments when deciding how many teams from that regional attend state.

Oh man I'll echo this sentiment. Besides wanting to go up against better competition, we go to the katy regional (which is an extra 4-5 hours of driving each way) just because it's so much better run. They have way more events, and you are less likely to get screwball rule interpretations.
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Re: Texas 2019

Post by EastStroudsburg13 »

I'll give you guys that, open regionals definitely should incentivize regional directors to run better tournaments to get more teams. In a closed system, the state organization is probably required to oversee the regional tournaments a bit more closely to make sure they're meeting a certain standard.
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Re: Texas 2019

Post by varunscs11 »

Also the really nice thing about the way Texas does things is that if certain tournament dates don't work out, it's not a big deal, you can just pick another regional. For example, there have been countless times where a certain regional was too close to the second out of state invitational or there wasn't enough time to really run Spring Test-Offs, or the date was just impossible to work with (i.e. during spring break). Having open regionals makes it possible to not have to reschedule the team's entire schedule. As people have said, distance is definitely one of the biggest deciding factors. We mostly go to the UT regional because it's in our hometown but there have been year's where the date didn't work or we wanted to compete against one of the other big three, in which case we went to another regional.

Prior to Texas giving automatic state bids to previous Nationals qualifiers, everyone had to go to regionals. I can't really speak for the other schools, but we thought of regionals as kinda just a hoop to jump through to get to state (unless we were trying to see how we'd do against one of the other big three). Of course, that didn't mean we purposefully didn't study or no showed an event, but it was a different level of commitment than state, which kinda turned into a month-long eat, breath, sleep Science Olympiad. Interestingly, before Texas got competitive state was seen in a similar way, but after 2013, we realized we actually have to work hard to make it out. So it's quite possible that in the future when Texas gets more competitive as a whole that regionals become more competitive even at the top.

Also: HUGE congrats to Seven Lakes, LASA, and Clements who put up some of the best scores in Texas history this past weekend. Any of those three scores would've typically been good enough for first and almost always good enough for nationals. I wish the current situation were different and allowed for more teams to go to Nationals because I know y'all would be extremely competitive at the top.
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Re: Texas 2019

Post by cool hand luke »

I've been looking at the last 4 years of division B results, and found this pretty interesting.

Place 2016 2017 2018 2019
1 36 43 57 60
2 89 118 94 134
3 136 123 115 139
4 166 160 190 146
5 177 173 193 171


At first I was mildly hopeful since Beckendorf has been slowly doing a little worse each year. Then I looked and realized that while they are having higher scores, no one is really closing the gap on them. what's happened is there are several teams now in the group right behind Beckendorff that are relatively competitive with each other and there are no longer huge score gaps between 2-5th place.
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Re: Texas 2019

Post by Riptide »

cool hand luke wrote:I've been looking at the last 4 years of division B results, and found this pretty interesting.

Place 2016 2017 2018 2019
1 36 43 57 60
2 89 118 94 134
3 136 123 115 139
4 166 160 190 146
5 177 173 193 171


At first I was mildly hopeful since Beckendorf has been slowly doing a little worse each year. Then I looked and realized that while they are having higher scores, no one is really closing the gap on them. what's happened is there are several teams now in the group right behind Beckendorff that are relatively competitive with each other and there are no longer huge score gaps between 2-5th place.
Before teams will be competitive with Beckendorff, the 2nd place team must first be challenged. Kealing has had no reason to try to challenge Beckendorff when they’ve had a pretty easy time getting 2nd place.
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Re: Texas 2019

Post by EastStroudsburg13 »

Riptide wrote:
cool hand luke wrote:I've been looking at the last 4 years of division B results, and found this pretty interesting.

Place 2016 2017 2018 2019
1 36 43 57 60
2 89 118 94 134
3 136 123 115 139
4 166 160 190 146
5 177 173 193 171


At first I was mildly hopeful since Beckendorf has been slowly doing a little worse each year. Then I looked and realized that while they are having higher scores, no one is really closing the gap on them. what's happened is there are several teams now in the group right behind Beckendorff that are relatively competitive with each other and there are no longer huge score gaps between 2-5th place.
Before teams will be competitive with Beckendorff, the 2nd place team must first be challenged. Kealing has had no reason to try to challenge Beckendorff when they’ve had a pretty easy time getting 2nd place.
I don't know that I agree with that; Kealing has only won second in the last three, and two of those were by just 5 points (AAH got 2nd in 2016).
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Re: Texas 2019

Post by cool hand luke »

if keeling doesn't absolutely bomb an event like they did this year that might be tough. I wonder what they did to get a 30 in experimental design.
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Re: Texas 2019

Post by ASK8 »

Ok as the main captain at Kealing there's a lot that happens that contributes to the reason why we haven't narrowed the gap between Beckendorf yet (although there is no doubt that bdjh is better than us).

The majority of the time it's not due to a lack of experience in an event or that device was absolute trash to begin with. There have been quite a few careless mistakes but we've also just had terrible experiences with proctors this year which has made it a lot harder to close that gap.

There are also quite a few careless mistakes that happen. Here are some examples:
- During state our mystery team knocked down what they made (it held the 10 weights that were given perfectly and would've gotten them 1st) and then rebuilt it but with only 3 weights so when they were asked to use 10 it didn't hold for long enough.
- For buggy the person who built the device lost his logs as well as the copies of his logs.

Experimental design though is a completely different story.. our scores got switched with B7 because our team number (b4) looked like B7 to the proctors, so the B7 team got first... rip
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