Read my interview with ICPCNews Meet The Coach taking Four Teams to #ICPC2015 !
Coach Mohamed Mahmoud Abd El-Wahab, from Egypt, is the first coach taking four of his teams to this World Finals in Marrakech!
Congratulations on this impressive success, know more about Coach Abd El-Wahab in this interview below, and check out some of his photos through his 15 years ICPC journey.
1- When and how did you start coaching?
My first interaction with ICPC was in October 2000, as a contestant in an unofficial Egyptian national contest for selecting the teams that are going to be sponsored to represent Egypt in the Regional contest ANARC2000. My team got the 3rd place in the Egyptian national, and the 4th in the Regional without any preparation or coaching for both of the contests. The contest was still new in the Arab Region, and it didn't require excellent skills during that period, it only required a fairly good coder who is able to solve Ad-Hoc problems correctly.
In year 2001, I trained for about one month before the Regional contest and got the 1st place and participated in the World Finals in Hawaii ICPC2002. After that I competed once more in 2002 and got the 4th place, after that some students from my university asked me to coach them, and they were my first two teams to coach in ANARC2003 and they got the 1st and 3rd place in it.
2- How many teams have you taken so far to the World Finals?
How much can you count? LOL.
FCI- Cairo University teams: Prague 2004, Texas 2006, Banff 2008, Harbin 2010, Orlando 2011, Warsaw 2012, St. Petersburg 2013, Yekaterinburg 2014, and soon Marrakesh 2015.
American University in Cairo teams: St. Petersburg 2013 and soon Marrakesh 2015.
Arab Academy for Science and Technology teams: St. Petersburg 2013 and soon Marrakesh 2015.
Faculty of Engineering - Ain Shams University teams: soon Marrakesh 2015.
They all add up to 14 team as a coach. (and 1 as a contestant).
3- What achievements are you most proud of?
- Being the Champion of the Arab Region 6 times.
- Always having at least one team in the top 10 during the last 15 years.
- Having nearly all my previous contestants working currently at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Twitter, and the remaining are PHD students in top ranked universities.
- Working with the ACPC team since 2011 to expand the region from 130 team to more than 1000 team in 2014, and reaching places like Syria and Palestine and enriching our region with great contestants from these countries that, without ACPC, wouldn't have been able to participate in such a prestigious event in another country.
- The honor of getting Coach Award, and looking forward to getting Senior Coach Award soon.
4- How did your point of view in coaching develop during the last 11 years?
During the period from 2003 to 2006, I used to train my students in coding only in order for them to learn how to write a clean code with very basic algorithms and data structures knowledge.
As the ICPC contest in the Arab Region expanded, and the problem set became more difficult, in the period from 2007 to 2011, I had to improve my methods of coaching into solid algorithms and data structure knowledge.
Starting from 2011 till now, I changed my plan into focusing on helping students to learn how to self study and improve their basic skills on their own, plus assigning senior contestants on training the new Junior contestants until they reach a progressed stage where I start guiding them through their training personally. This method had multiple profits, as I got to train more teams, and my senior contestants gained more experience by coaching their colleagues.
5- How do you manage to train multiple teams although they are competing against each other? and to get four of them to the World Finals in one year?
Assigning a part of my own house as a training sanctuary for all the teams that I coach from different universities, and they come and train whenever they want, usually I am available during most periods to help them select problems to solve and explain solutions to them. They also get to know each other and help each other solve problems, I also have a Facebook group that has all my contestants since year 2000, and I add the new contestants to it every year so any team from any university can ask questions on it and exchange solutions from all the other team members from different universities and ages.
Having training camps that have students from different universities living together in the same place for a long period of time gets them to be friends, which encourages them to exchange knowledge, until they stop feeling that they are competing against each other and care about the benefit of the group.
Finally creating training contests on a2oj.com which enables the teams to attend the same contest in different times and merge the scoreboards in one scoreboard gives them the ability to benchmark their skills and know their weaknesses and help each other in overcoming them.
6- What was your training plan during the past year that got 11 of your teams in the top 20 teams in your region?
By the end of January 2014, I selected the students that I am going to train personally through a qualification process, you can find it in this link:
https://sites.google.com/site/acmicpcfcicu/home
All students who qualify through this process, I started training them on Codeforces problems during the period from February to May, especially Div 2, D and E problems.
During June I was busy in the World Finals, in July, I had a training camp for all of them in Algorithms and Data Structures for about a month, it was hosted by the Arab Academy for Science and Technology in Alexandria, we used to eat, sleep, solve problems, describe algorithms and data structures and do nothing other than problem solving for a whole month.
During August, I made 3 individual contests per week for all of them, from previous regionals' problem sets, especially Europe and Asia Regions 2013.
By the end of August, Me and my students collaborated together to assign each team's members, and during the next two months, I started a system of 3 teams contests per week, and the training becomes a whole team training together instead of individuals training.
During the last two weeks before the Region, I would be fully available to all of them to help them write their team notes, and re-explain any algorithm or data structure or contest solving strategy that is a weakness to any of them.
7- How do you choose your team members?
The team members selection process passes through multiple filters. The first filter is managed by my senior contestants, who are still undergraduates, and this process guides them to pass through the first qualification phase that I previously mentioned.
The second phase now is to guide them into being mature enough to be able to choose their own team mates, after that I get their feedbacks on their team members preferences, and try to configure the team to satisfy as much requirements as I can from this feedback, and during the first two weeks after this process, they are allowed to exchange team members if both teams agree.
8- Don't you think it is more efficient to focus coaching one very strong team instead of distributing your efforts amongst multiple teams that will compete against each other eventually?
Actually, I think it is less efficient to coach one team in the World Finals, because you will not have the ability to test the performance of your team. when they attend a contest alone and get X number of problems solved correctly you will not know if X is a good enough number to give them good rank in the world finals since you don't have other teams to compare that X to.
So I think that having multiple teams is a point of strength, not a weakness.
9- Don't you get tired of coaching after all these years?
I don't think I will be tired from coaching before getting the ICPC World Finals trophy to be put in the training sanctuary in my house with my ACPC trophies.
