Dear ARML Team,
It was great to see everyone at our first Bay Area practice this past Sunday, and I especially enjoyed closing out practice with our traditional ice cream social! A few updates for this week, including a couple action items:
Team Assignments
We announced the roster for this year’s two elite teams (A1 and A2) on Sunday. Those teams are listed below. As always, with all of the talent that we have on our team, it was quite a difficult decision.
We will split our remaining students into teams of 15. These other teams are not ranked, and will be based partly on student preference. We plan to announce these teams at this weekend’s Bay Area practice, and to practice in those teams on Saturday.
We’re opening a limited time opportunity for students not on elite teams to request teammates. You may submit a request to be placed on a team with specific other students. While it might not be possible to fulfill every such request, we intend to honor these requests as much as possible in the selection process.
Please note that practice attendance is a factor in both elite team placement and selection of alternates; see the Policies for more information. In particular, elite team members who miss practices may be removed from their teams, and we will select alternates during the week prior to the competition based primarily on practice attendance.
If you’d like to request teammates, please complete the following form by Thursday at 6pm:
T-Shirt Poll
We have received t-shirt designs from our team members. Please vote for your preferred design by Thursday at 6pm. The winning design will be announced at practice on Saturday, and teams will vote on their preferred shirt colors.
Practice Materials and Optional Homework
Practice materials from our tryouts and the first Bay Area practice have now been posted. Note that each team at practice covers different material – if your team hasn’t covered something yet, please don’t review it on your own, as your team will likely use this material at our next practice.
We have posted an individual round on ContestDojo as optional practice material. If you’d like to partake, you may complete this individual round at any time on ContestDojo. We’ll post additional individual rounds weekly throughout the month. These individual rounds are auto-graded, and coaches will not review your submissions or look at your scores – this is purely for yourself. Solutions can be found at the same practice materials link.
Second Bay Area Practice
Our second Bay Area practice will take place on Saturday, noon to 5pm at AlphaStar Academy’s new Cupertino campus (1072 S De Anza Blvd # B205, San Jose, CA 95129). The details are on the practice website. Like this past weekend, we’ll spend the last 45 minutes of practice doing something fun to help everyone meet each other.
Please note: This is AlphaStar’s new location, not the old office that some students may have visited before. Please double-check the address before heading out.
We encourage everyone to carpool to practice with others from your city or area. If you’re unable to attend, please fill out our Practice Absence Form and provide a (good) reason. Examples of good reasons include health issues and conflicting events; we discourage using studying for exams as a reason to miss practice.
Transportation
We will provide transportation to Reno for all traveling students and chaperones. Everyone traveling will be assigned a pickup time and location, departing at around 8am on May 29 and returning at around 8pm on May 30. Pickup and dropoff locations this year are anticipated to be the same as last year, in San Jose, Palo Alto, San Ramon, and Davis.
A number of you have asked about traveling independently with parents to ARML. In order to maintain supervision during the trip, we require that any student traveling independently to be dropped off and picked up at UNR at designated times. We anticipate these time intervals to be approximately a 1:30pm dropoff on Friday and a 3:30pm pickup on Saturday. If you are intending to travel independently, please let us know so we can record this information prior to making bus assignments.
We’ll share more detailed logistics information in the coming weeks.
As always, if you have any questions, please let us know!
–Moor and the rest of the SFBA / NorCal coaching staff
A1 Team
Redacted for the website – email [email protected] if you need assistance.
A2 Team
Redacted
Other Teams
Redacted
