First I wanted to say how appreciative I am of the competitive programming community. I started participating in competitive programming contests 17 months ago and I can say that competiting online and in-person has helped me both push myself past what I thought I could be and meet some great people who share similar passions.
About a month ago my team just barely qualified past the ICPC NA East Division (which consisted of NENA, ECNA, and GNY). This regional was especially challenging due to the breadth of good teams that showed up from East Central universities. This is the second time that my team made it to the national round, so we have a bit of experience.
Now that my team is on a collision course with NAC for a second time, I am doing a retrospective on what my team can do to improve its chances at qualifying for the world finals. There are several aspects that my team has already improved upon leading up to this regional (ex/ patching blindspots, having useful reference documents, better computer management), but from practices I can tell that we simply need to get better at solving the harder problems if we want to get in the qualifying range at NAC.
One characteristic that put my team in contrast with the teams I saw at last year's NAC, and the reason why I am writing this post, is that no Ohio State team is receiving coaching from professors or other professionals. Since I have no experience being coached in competitive programming, I have no idea how much coaching impacts a team's ability to improve. To get this far, my team has simply invested an enormous amount of time and passion into practicing around the clock in attempt to get in shape.
From what I understand, getting a coach would require a significant level of investment for my team. I intend this post as an inquiry into people's experiences with coaching and whether they deem coaching to be legitimately valuable. More specifically:
- What specific area do coaches help you improve? General problem-solving skills? Coverage of standard problems? Competition strategies?
- Does coaching result in a realizable amount of improvement in teams?
- What characteristics makes a good coach?
- If I were to spend money to help prepare, should coaching be where I spend it?
I want to make competitive programming more established at my university, but I've found that the steep learning curve makes it a difficult sell to both faculty and students. If you have any pointers to help with that too, I would love the help!
On another note, I would love to do some collaboration with other NAC teams leading up to the competition to jointly improve our learning. Feel free to message me if you want to set anything up. Who knows, maybe I'll be representing your college next year when I am doing my masters :). Along that line of thinking feel free to reach out if you have any masters opportunities for competitive programmers like me.
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My sense is that at most schools in NA that qualify for WF, coaches play a relatively limited role in training the WF-qualifying team. In my experience, it's more common for coaches to primarily work with newer students to help them build up to the level necessary to compete/achieve an average performance in regionals, and to help all teams with logistics such as contest registration, travel planning, etc. (In general, very few professors keep up with the contest meta the same way most NAC-qualifying students do, and I haven't heard of schools except maybe UCF bringing in coaches from outside the faculty. As a result, few schools have access to coaches who can provide substantive problem-solving training for NAC-level teams.)
To a first-order, I think NAC is basically a Codeforces skill check--the correlation between NAC performance and CF team rating is high, and the best way to make WF fairly consistently is to hit a CF team rating of 2600 or so (though 2400-2600 also has a pretty good shot). It's valuable to do some practice ICPC contests to get used to working as a team, but things like contest strategy aren't as important at the level of attempting to qualify for WF as they are at the level of e.g. aiming for a WF medal. In part, this is because the problems you have to solve don't require as much specialization (e.g. qualifying for WF generally doesn't require heavy-duty geometry, really nasty simulation, etc) and are generally covered by the syllabus set by CF/other contests (with some exceptions--things like NAC24 I are a little messier and may benefit from more ICPC-specific prep).
That said, happy to consult with/answer questions for any teams preparing for the upcoming NAC free of charge--message me on Discord if interested (I can be found on the NA ICPC Discord, send me a message and include your school name). I'm happy to answer general prep/strategy questions, look at virtual participations and let you know if anything seems off in how you thought about the contest, etc (but I probably won't have time to discuss/recommend specific problems unless you happen to have questions about a problem I know well). I'll make a Discord server if there's substantial interest in this. But the short advice is that if your team grinds CF and does a good number of practice contests (maybe once a week for a couple months before the contest--even better if you can find other teams to do the contests with you and discuss afterwards), you'll be in fairly good shape.
That's honestly a relief to hear. I have confidence that I can make it to that rating range if I invest enough time and effort. My team has put a lot of time into practice ICPC contests (and I feel that our collaboration is on point) but we didn't really know how much online contests like CF impacts our performance in ICPC-style problems. I'll make sure to put a lot more effort into this platform and communicate that to my team.
I really appreciate your help! If I need any specific help I'll make sure to send you a message.