Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
The thing that concerns me is the lack of success that MN has had on the larger stage. While that isn't exactly the best metric for team quality it's, I believe, an important metric to look at and analyze. Have regions that've grown slower had more competitive success? Have there been regions that've grown the same way but have had more competitive success? How has "team churn" related to competitive success?
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I don't know about other regions, but the big stage is pretty hard to get onto! Looking simply at Einstein appearances, MN has had 0 in the past decade (I'm not going to go back to team's 6 or 10 to see how we did in the 90's). However, we can also look at Einstein appearances based on team age - 1816 is currently our oldest team. Before that, we had 1623 through 2008. Simply put, a majority of Einstein teams are older than MN teams. From what I can tell looking through the past few years, at least 75% of the teams on Einstein have been older than the oldest active MN team!
Looking at it on a division elim's level would take more time, but we have made strides the past couple of years with multiple teams making it into division elims (and in 2013 making to division finals!). From a quick glance, I would say this past year close to 50% of teams in division elims were older teams than any MN team.
It's hard to judge competitive success when the upper levels of the competition are dominated by older teams. Even though my team has been around for 8 years, we still have things to learn, and ways the team wants to grow and change. Maybe that never changes, but the older a team gets the more stuff they get figured out, and the more experience they have to rely on. Of course, there are always exceptions. There are always going to be young teams that show up out of nowhere and do great, and there are always going to be old teams that seem to fall apart from one season to the next. But I don't think that has anything to do with regional growth.