One of the things our current pair of coaches seems not to have done so well is to really increase community interest here in the US. We regularly get out-posted by 5-1 or worse from tiny countries like Brasil and Argentina even when Grubbs is busy blowing them off the court.
This is a
really hard question. I don't really agree with Coco about the "black box" approach we've had... for those who've posted in the off-site forum, we've had the opportunity to view and debate rosters, tactics and enthusiasm settings for nearly every NT game. One of the complications is that these are necessarily sensitive topics, which precludes us from posting these things here. Even player ratings, which have been posted on the site, are best kept there to prevent other teams from scouting us too easily.
That said, there are things we can do to facilitate user interaction.
(1) Continue to make effort to post more in the BB forums (realizing many users won't come to the off-site forum) for things like game threads, current rosters and tracking lists, etc where we're not compromising the team.
(2) What is clear, I think, is that people get interested when their players are involved. Of course, with <18 players on the team this isn't a whole lot of teams. But, including the ~140 19+ players we're tracking, and the 209 on the preliminary list of 18 year olds, a lot more teams can be involved. So, I think we can do a better job communicating with teams training tracked players, perhaps by adding a web interface to the NT db for US managers to track their players, update ratings, and see how their players stack up. This actually gives two really useful outcomes: (a) managers can be more involved during the season in their NT-quality players, and see how they're progressing, what the player needs, etc, and (b) allows us to get mid-season ratings updates (normally we can only do this for non-team players between seasons otherwise we suffer and enthusiasm hit by adding/removing players).
(3) Fix up the off-site forum to make it a more useful resource for debating tactics, etc leading up to NT/U21 games. Of course, people still need to go to the forum. One way to do this is to make the discussion more globally useful. So, instead of just posting a roster/tactics as we do now, expand this to include some scouting of the opposing team, their recent tactics, etc, to make it a useful resource for users interested in getting a better handle on the process of choosing tactics. Hopefully this would be a draw for some of our newer managers who are still figuring out the ins and outs of choosing lineups/tactics for their league games.