Secret Draft

By Reid JS on November 24, 2023

Last year, I assigned athletes to teams using this approach:
  1. I put people who wanted to be on the same team with each other
  2. I evenly distributed car owners
  3. I balanced by speed
Then, I published the teams and we did some rebalancing in the group chat afterwards. This worked pretty well, but I don't like having so much authority over the initial team assignments. This year I'm proposing we give team captains more agency over their team with a *Secret Draft*.

Race organizers and team captains will participate in the *Secret Draft* once the race has been filled. Team captains take turns picking athletes following the "Snake" draft pattern (1-2-3-4-4-3-2-1). Once every athlete has been assigned to a team, we will take a holistic look at the team balance. If there are obvious personality conflicts, speed imbalances, or an uneven distribution of cars, team captains and race organizers will manually rebalance the teams.

Afterwards, teams will be revealed to the public group chat. Some athletes may want to switch to a different team. The athlete can share this publicly in the group chat, or privately with the race organizers, and we will work with them and the team captains to find a fair swap.

What do you think?