Deeper or wider?

[TSIAJ]

I'm going into high school this upcoming school year, and since I'll be playing with new teammates (same school, though), I'm going to be transitioning my playing as well, to accommodate to the team's needs.

My strong points are by far fine arts, specifically music and some decent visual arts, and post-Renaissance literature, which most of my teammates are already quite good at. That being said, I have a few weak points as well, which are covered fairly poorly by my teammates. These topics include science and to a lesser extent geography (I usually never power these). Our geography specialist left for another high school, and our collective geography knowledge is average at best.

For my strong points, I can power most music tossups in packets I've played and studied (LIST, Prison Bowl, some NSC tournaments, etc.), and do fairly well on visual art.

So, my question is, should I dig deeper into the topics I'm already good at, which could show some minor improvements, but not much, or study something that may need a lot more work to get good at, such as science?

Thanks!

[heterodyne]

I'm going into high school this upcoming school year, and since I'll be playing with new teammates (same school, though), I'm going to be transitioning my playing as well, to accommodate to the team's needs.

My strong points are by far fine arts, specifically music and some decent visual arts, and post-Renaissance literature, which most of my teammates are already quite good at. That being said, I have a few weak points as well, which are covered fairly poorly by my teammates. These topics include science and to a lesser extent geography (I usually never power these). Our geography specialist left for another high school, and our collective geography knowledge is average at best.

For my strong points, I can power most music tossups in packets I've played and studied (LIST, Prison Bowl, some NSC tournaments, etc.), and do fairly well on visual art.

So, my question is, should I dig deeper into the topics I'm already good at, which could show some minor improvements, but not much, or study something that may need a lot more work to get good at, such as science?

Thanks!

I mean, this depends on a couple things. Do you have teammates who are willing to study the things that the team is weak at? If not, you might need to study those things. Also consider whether your investment in science will have good payoff. If you seriously don't like science then you probably won't do as well studying it as you would if you keep on the categories you already know. Having a significant hole in coverage is gonna hurt a lot for things like consistency, and balance is important, so if you're the only one willing to study science I'd say go for it.

[TSIAJ]

I'm going into high school this upcoming school year, and since I'll be playing with new teammates (same school, though), I'm going to be transitioning my playing as well, to accommodate to the team's needs.

My strong points are by far fine arts, specifically music and some decent visual arts, and post-Renaissance literature, which most of my teammates are already quite good at. That being said, I have a few weak points as well, which are covered fairly poorly by my teammates. These topics include science and to a lesser extent geography (I usually never power these). Our geography specialist left for another high school, and our collective geography knowledge is average at best.

For my strong points, I can power most music tossups in packets I've played and studied (LIST, Prison Bowl, some NSC tournaments, etc.), and do fairly well on visual art.

So, my question is, should I dig deeper into the topics I'm already good at, which could show some minor improvements, but not much, or study something that may need a lot more work to get good at, such as science?

Thanks!

I mean, this depends on a couple things. Do you have teammates who are willing to study the things that the team is weak at? If not, you might need to study those things. Also consider whether your investment in science will have good payoff. If you seriously don't like science then you probably won't do as well studying it as you would if you keep on the categories you already know. Having a significant hole in coverage is gonna hurt a lot for things like consistency, and balance is important, so if you're the only one willing to study science I'd say go for it.

We have an okay science guy, but he's more willing to study history and literature. He's done okay in MS sets, but will be totally clueless in HS sets.

And I'm not just talking about science; even geography and history. Obviously, I can't study all of the subcategories, so I was thinking I could cover a few portions of a larger category such as history.

[Ciorwrong]

If you can power most Fine Arts stuff at the HS level as a freshmen, you should be in good shape. Specialists in Fine Arts seem to do very well because, at least in my experience, I've seen far less specialists in those categories than say Literature and Science. That isn't to say that teams don't have specialists in Fine Arts, but it can be hard to fit specialists in the Big 3 and in Fine Arts on A team, because there are other categories besides those 4 (assuming they truly are specialists and have minimal/scant knowledge elsewhere). I'm pretty bad at Fine Arts, so maybe I overvalue the knowledge.

Maybe try to master a smaller distribution too like Mythology or current events that doesn't come up that often. With that and Fine Arts, you can make a great contribution, though you definitely can contribute to almost any HS team already.

[TSIAJ]

If you can power most Fine Arts stuff at the HS level as a freshmen, you should be in good shape. Specialists in Fine Arts seem to do very well because, at least in my experience, I've seen far less specialists in those categories than say Literature and Science. That isn't to say that teams don't have specialists in Fine Arts, but it can be hard to fit specialists in the Big 3 and in Fine Arts on A team, because there are other categories besides those 4 (assuming they truly are specialists and have minimal/scant knowledge elsewhere). I'm pretty bad at Fine Arts, so maybe I overvalue the knowledge.

Maybe try to master a smaller distribution too like Mythology or current events that doesn't come up that often. With that and Fine Arts, you can make a great contribution, though you definitely can contribute to almost any HS team already.

I can power most music tossups, but only some art, but I'm working on that.
I've also been recently studying some philosophy, so that should help some. It often goes hand in hand with regular literature study techniques, so it's been going very well.

Since literature is such a large canon, my teammates have been splitting up some of the work.