>From my perspective as the president of an organization that will probably be composed of mostly Freshman and Sophomores next year, I think that having a Division II in ACF is a GREAT idea. We haven't faced any of the really top-notch teams or grad students yet-- the only tourney we've been to this year is the Carleton Undergraduate Tournament-- but we have played a lot of ACF packets during practice thanks to the Stanford and Maryland Archives, and most of the team has problems with the question difficulty. As a 4-year veteran of a (relatively) high-quality High School circuit, _I_ know that reading these questions will help us in the long run, as Joel said in an earlier post, but a lot of my teammates don't realize this, on either a conscious or unconscious level, and so they sort of shut down when I announce "OK, we're doing an ACF packet now!" (Either that or curl up in fetal positions and start twitching.) Add that response to the prospect of being beat down by a powerhouse team like Michigan, Illinois, Chicago, etc. with grad students (an especially big problem for us, since Grinnell, being a liberal-arts college, doesn't have any of those ;)and you have a pretty good reason to not go to ACF tournaments. I think that if there was an ACF Division II, though, it would be more worth our while to attend tournaments in that format. True, we still wouldn't get a lot of the questions, but at the same time we'd be facing off against teams of similar ability and so wouldn't get as discouraged as easily. I don't think that dumbing down the questions for DivII is a good idea, for the same reasons as have been mentioned in previous posts, but I think the inclusion of a second division at ACF tourneys will encourage a lot of small and/or new teams, like Grinnell, to get out onto the circuit more. Just my $0.02, Brad =8-)P
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:44 AM EST EST