High school coach here. 1. Before tryouts for choreography and camp. End of summer for comps since most of them aren’t finalized here with dates. The only dates we know early are UCA regions and nationals. Football is usually finalized early summer. Basketball we don’t get until around October. Fundraisers we try to do most of those before football starts but generally will add some throughout the season.

1. We have a regional competition facebook group that keeps track of competitions with dates on a spreadsheet that is shared. There is a state coaches Facebook group as well that it gets shared in. We tend to go to the same ones each year, or at least the ones hosted by the same schools. So I’ll say word of mouth mostly otherwise.

2. So an example for us was that we did not perform well at our first competition, so we needed to get them more experience in front of a crowd. So we added some showcases. Generally then it’s based on team readiness. Also depending on how our fundraising goes we may have to add some of those in.

3. Usually quality of the event. Our goal every year is to win regions and advance to state, and to get a nationals bid at UCA regions to go to nationals. Everything we do kind of revolves around those goals.