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.