Rebuilding a Squad and Dealing with an Ability Gap

[NLiu]

While my school (St. Joseph's IN) does not exactly qualify as a "new" team, we have have only been seriously getting into pyramidal quiz bowl and experiencing some success for the past few years. Nevertheless, I believe that this question is rather pertinent to many who do not have well-established programs with consistent talent and "improvement" methods.

My problem is that, although we've rather consistently developed specialists to fill in graduation gaps over the past few years, when the three other seniors on our current A-Team graduate we do not have anybody left to clearly fill their spots and their knowledge areas. We do have a decently talented current freshman class who have shown interest in the pyramidal format and could be very good with some improvement, but the ability gap between them (arguably the next best players) and myself is presenting me difficulties as I consider the future.

The difficulty is that while I am in no way, shape, or form a "one-man team" I am still currently good enough that if I play next to the rest of these freshman I will beat them to almost any tossup if it does get far enough. They are well aware of this and many of them are highly resistant to playing on the A-team because, in their words, they don't want to "just sit there and watch." We have done a decent job of instructing them on how to improve in quiz bowl and the importance of working hard, but there still remains the difficulty (if we promote them) of their simply losing patience after some time and just giving up and letting me handle all the questions.

My other difficulty is on what I should do personally, since I believe that I could very well branch out right now and learn several other categories that our graduating seniors cover, but doing so would almost certainly drive off the freshmen. On the other hand, though, I am afraid that if I do trust them to learn areas like RMP or Fine Arts they may not do any work and simply not improve as well as I could have if I just learned them myself.

I suppose I could also let them play on their own "B-Team" next year; that would certainly allow them to score many more points and might possibly encourage them to improve and grow as a cohesive unit without me for when I graduate (I'm currently a junior). However, I feel that they just wouldn't face enough top competition or have enough motivation to improve if they aren't "under the lights," as it were, on the A-Team.

So I suppose my general question is--what you do when you have one player who is simply far better than all the others? Do you risk allowing a one-man team (with the corresponding slump that will probably occur when our inexperienced program has to deal with my departure?) Otherwise, how do I work to integrate young and rather unconfident freshmen and sophomores into a competitive condition?

I'm sorry if this is confusing or unclear...I'd appreciate any insight that any of you might have.

[TylerV]

I have a little experience with being on the freshman side of things. Last year we had a senior who was far better than the rest of the team seen here and here.

There are three benefits to having inexperienced/newer players play with you rather than their own B team.
1. You can serve as an adviser of sorts sharing study tips and knowledge that can only come with experience.
2. Players can find something that you don't know that well and master it for themselves(which will serve as a great base for them to expand after you graduate)
3. More players can almost always help on bonuses at the very minimum. Our senior essentially solo'd an IS-set and got a rather low 12.03 ppb. When we played as a full team at HSNCT, however, our ppb stayed the same while everyone else's dropped by 4-5 points(Of course the fact that he along with the entire team improved by that point affects that as well)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is always a benefit to having new players play with you, and while I understand their concern about sitting around and watching I cannot stress enough how much better it will make them in the end.(There is also a great feeling when you get a toss up while playing with that dominant player and knowing that you made a difference)

[at your pleasure]

I would suggest your teammate's read Mike Cheyne's "How to be a fourth scorer" post and the followups to it (viewtopic.php?f=30&t=14291); although Mike wrote it based on his experiences on the Minnesota quizbowl team much of it is very applicable to being the second/third/fourth scorer on a team with much better players at any level.