All coaches of ICPC World Finals teams have successful shepherded a team through a grueling series of tests to reach the top contest. Some coaches have built dynasties.
Coaches are essential to the ACM-ICPC. Usually computer science professors or graduate students, coaches identify promising students from their programs. They often run local competitions for interested students to figure out who is the most likely to succeed.
Coaches carefully form teams to have a variety of strengths to handle the diverse problems found in the contest. Then they train those teams, working year-round to ensure that students are ready to take their seats at the regional contest and ultimately on the world finals stage.
It is a feat to do this once, but this year’s coach award honorees, presented by IBM, have done it multiple times.
Coach awardees include:
Songshan Guo from Zhongshan (Sun Yat-Sen) University. Coach Songshan Guo says he wants to help students become independent learners. His Senior Coach Award is for bringing 15 or more teams to the World Finals.
Slim Abdennadher from German University in Cairo. Coach Abdennadher says for him, coaching is about empowering others.
Aaron Bloomfield from University of Virginia. Coach Bloomfield also runs a large high school programming contest, to help develop the next generation of programmers.
Kevin Compton from University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Coach Compton says he enjoys working with “enthusiastic, talented young people.”
Arup Guha from University of Central Florida. Coach Guha has a passion for developing female coders, and has put together a special program at his university.
Vladimir Kuznetsov from Petrozavodsk University. Coach Kuznetsov says that it is an honor to teach his world-class students.
Anton Pankratiev from Moscow State University. Coach Pankratiev says he enjoys interacting with “very intelligent” he meets as a result of coaching.
Denis Vlasov from Petrozavodsk University. Coach Vlasov says that although the contests are exciting, the training is great for developing students as coders.
Yingjie Wu from Fuzhou University. Coach Yingjie Wu says he is motivated by “the fact that your teaching can help students to solve interesting and challenging problems.”
Amanda Sturgill for ICPCNews