Ultimately what we put on the court come game day is a product of everything we do in the entire NT as a whole. It starts with finding the young players, then developing them, involves organization and management, and ultimately, lies on tactics the day of the game. My question to the candidates is where in this entire process do you think we are getting beat? I'd also like to hear how you would try to address what you see as the area we are getting beat.
I think our process for finding and developing talent is currently AWESOME. We have threads for every age group 18-21 on the offsite (which my opponent wouldn't know about!) with over 100+ comments in many of them! The chatter about training strategies, potential caps, finding players, etc is great. And there are many great scouts for each age group, also on the offsite, so that we can find all the potential NT talent. So I don't think that's our problem.
I don't think our management or tactics or enthusiasm management is the problem either. Jfarb did a fantastic job of that. Things are so close at the world-class NT that just super small differences are key. Home court advantage was one of them this year for helping Poland win the title. Nothing we can do about that.
The one thing I might say that other countries do better than us is that they keep their homegrown talent mostly at home. Teams sacrifice their club teams for the good of their NT in some cases. I think Americans care more about winning the club title than the NT title. And there's nothing wrong with that at all, it's their choice. We train our youngsters for a while, then they get too expensive so we sell them off to Latvia or something, and some are never seen (or trained) again. Many also get their GS abused. It would be great if we could keep as many potential NT'ers in house as possible. But I honestly don't know if there's a solution to that, other than BB-mailing with the American owner to give him strategies for keeping his salary as low as possible for as long as possible.
Sorry for the essay...