The way the Texas academic decathlon state meet has some major flaws in the way it is handled that can cause multiple problems for multiple teams and people, and it needs to be changed. Here's a framework that I think could do a lot of cool things.

The first thing to do is to consolidate the regions. keep one for Lubbock, El Paso, San Antonio, and the valley. Keep the three for Houston, but move the five that occupy the DFW area into 3 as well. There's no reason why Region XI should be all small schools, might as well just put them in with another region, probably VIII. Then put the Region XIII large and small with Region IX since X already has so many (I don't know the geography of Dallas well, there's probably a better way to do this).

Region I-Lubbock
Region II-El Paso
Region III-Valley
Region IV-San Antonio
Region V-West Houston
Region VI-South Houston
Region VII-North Houston
Region VIII-Forth Worth
Region IX-Dallas
Region X-Metroplex

Now at the regional meets, everyone will be competing as one big meet; rather, every team will be competing for the title of Regional Champ, and within this meet every team in each category will also compete for Small, Medium, and Large championships (ex. Rockwall wins overall and Medium still, Plano large, etc.), just like it is now, except without a distinction for judging and medals.

Every region winner will be an automatic qualifier for the Championship invitational (I'm getting as to why it's an invitational), giving us ten automatic qualifiers. The next 10 teams will also receive automatic qualification into the Championship invitational.

The state meet will be broken up into two different locations: Houston and Dallas. Sorry San Antonio, but these two have the most schools who participate by far, making it overall the easiest location for everyone. One meet each year will be the championship meet which will include 40 teams; one meet will be the consolation meet, which will automatically have the 20 worst teams in the field, regardless of where they are or how big they are. The top 20 teams of the middle 40 get an INVITE to the championship meet; they must accept if the championship meet is in their hometown (it will alternate between each location every year), and they can choose to stay at the consolation meet if they don't wish to go to state in a different city. Say, for example, if Pasadena is 30th and the championship meet is in Dallas, then they can choose to go to the consolation meet in Houston.

This would give us all title contenders at one site, cut down on costs for schools who have troubles. Thoughts?

1. You forgot Corpus Christi.
2. It's a long way to Lubbock from Amarillo or Odessa... But, this being Texas, we already knew that.
3. Not being able to plan on a set number of schools makes for a difficulty in planning events.
4. What happens at the consolation event to keep it from being a lolevent?

1. Consider Corpus as part of the Valley, I suppose
2. Yea, no way getting around that. Maybe have a 3rd site in El Paso or Lubbock, with one site having an off year every year.
3. Both meets would be set at 40; I guess if enough teams elect to stay at the consolation meet, we would have to reach all the way into the bottom of the top 80 to fill it up. Both meets, however, would always have 40 teams.
4. I don't want the second meet to be called a consolation meet, but it gives a bunch of teams with lackluster or young programs to win some awards, as well as recognizing the small, medium, and large winners at each meet. If the bottom 10 teams from Large decide they would rather win more medals at the consolation meet, then that gives them an incentive right there. Zzzptm, if you had a team that was 10k away from the top, somewhere in the 30s in terms of rankings, and have the option to stay in Dallas and have the potential to win more medals, wouldn't you do that for the kids on your team to enjoy some more medals?

I would prefer to just have a gut-it-out, 80-team free-for-all at one event, but I've been told by TAD that it is just logistically impossible (I completely disagree); this is my alternative. This is also based on the assumption that we recently seem to have come to on this board that coach is more important than school.

Well, if I knew that ringer teams were dropping out of the big running to go on a medals raid in my division, I wouldn't be too thrilled with that... it's the problem they have in CA where you'd rather be 21st in the state than 20th.