How many players on a team?

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Shomik Ghose
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How many players on a team?

Post by Shomik Ghose »

Is it better to have four or five players on a team? Here is the specific situation we are in:

Next year we will have 5 people vying for a spot on our A team:

Player 1: Very strong at history (made NHBB national playoffs last year, qualified for NHBB nats this year-obviously nats have't happened yet) and literature, pretty good at art, current events, and some trash, has a lot of general knowledge

Player 2: Strong at math, literature and art, is a good chem player, knows some history, knows some general knowledge

Player 3: Strong in science and math, especially physics

Player 4: Very strong in general knowledge, strong in history (qualified for NHBB nationals both this and last year) and current events

Player 5: Strong in history (did not qualify for NHBB nationals last year) and current events, particularly strong at Roman history, knows some trash (but a lot of that trash overlaps with Player 1)

At a tournament in which we played together, Player 1 scored the highest, followed by Players 2 and 4, followed by Players 3 and 5.

Players 1, 2, 3, and 4 have won a tournament together.

My questions are: 1. Should we have 4 or 5 players on the team?
2. If we have 4 players, who should we cut?
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Stats.PNG
These are statistics from a tournament we played together earlier this season on HFT. The player numbers are written next to each row.
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Last edited by Shomik Ghose on Wed Mar 22, 2017 12:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
St. Johns A
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Beevor Feevor
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Re: How many players on a team?

Post by Beevor Feevor »

I won't speak to the actual skill/category competencies of people on your team, since that seems like something that you could understand better than anyone on the forums looking abstractedly at your situation. What I will say is that this decision isn't necessarily one that you need to make now: you can definitely wait and shuffle lineups during the regular season in the hopes of finding the best one!

What I would definitely recommend is to lock it down to 4 players at some point before the second half of the season, so that you all can better study and fill the gaps in your knowledge before nationals. Having 5 people that are all pretty good isn't something that's done a ton by top teams in high school (see PACE NSC last year, where the only team to have 5 people on their roster in the top 2 brackets was Chattahoochee). Generally, you want to reach a 4-man lineup that matches up best with other teams in the sense that all bases are somewhat adequately covered.
Eric Xu
Western Albemarle '15
Virginia '19
Harvard '23
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