Imagine a situation: you and your students participated in a big contest, and at the end you solved much less problems than your trainees.

First of all, I really think that this kind of situation is, in fact, highly desired: the young ones must achieve more than the old ones did, that is the natural course of things, and it's called a progress.

But, on the other hand, you all know that our environment is highly competitive and very vicious (maybe like every other kind of sports). No one here is interested in other user's opinion unless that user is orange or red. The average green participant is often a target of mocking. So, for a large part of community, it's only rating and medals that matter.

In these circumstanses, the chair of the coach turns out to be very tough. You know, the coach just must be stronger than his students, or else face the consequences. So the situation mentioned in the heading would in fact be a hard hit to the teacher's authority. Students may start to doubt the coach's expertise, and even may come to the question "why do you take a place of coach? maybe there needs to be someone else?". Quite often we read in the news how a top athlete leaves his trainer when he thinks that the trainer is not good enough. Most experienced students may start to get bored in class, telling you "why are we still learning this stupid dynamic programming? when will you show us some really cool things like the dominator tree?" (yup, they really say that to one of my friends)

It's probably not that horrific when student outperforms coach a single time (in that case that student will supposely consider that a huge achievement), but, just to make situation worse, let's imagine that coach loses to his tranees (say, maybe to the top team out of 10 teams) on a regular basis.

So imagine that after you failed, the attitude of students towards you has changed and become more dismissive. I must say, that kind of thing had almost never happened to me (that's not because I am clever or skilled or any of the kind, I just worked as a coach for a relatively short time), but it definitely did happen to my former students who are now coaches themselves. I suppose that thing may happen to anyone, maybe with exception of Gennady.

I believe that almost everywhere openly expressing complaints to the teacher is considered as bad manners. But, on the other hand, remember that poor guy who taught programming (maybe C++?) on the first year of your college. "Oh, he's not even capable of designing an LRU cache...", "Eh, he just knows nothing about <execution> header" and that kind of stuff. I am sure that no one of you mocked him, but you hardly enjoyed going to his classes.

So how do you manage with this situation? I know several approaches:

• "So, young one, you outperformed me, that's great, but I still solved thousands more problems / created hundred more problems / invested tens of thousands of hours". One possible counterargument is "if you're so smart why aren't you rich?" "Yes you did all of that, and at the end I'm still better than you (in case of "thousands of hours" you've also just wasted your life)"

• "So, young one, you outperformed me, that's great, but I still write clearer code / am more experienced in explaining things / have a job in a huge corporation and much greater salary than you". The counterargument for this case, I suppose, is "That would be relevant if you taught the applied programming, but this is the competirive programming classes, and you suck in it".

• "So, young one, if you are not satisfied with the results of my work, you can just go and find another coach". That one is used by one of my colleagues, and in fact is the most effective in the backwoods we came from, where all of the more or less experienced coaches can be counted on the fingers of one hand. But some students can take this as a guide to action and just relocate to better cities, as a result, you will be left without promising trainees.

What kind of excuses do you have? What helps you to mantain your self-esteem? What is your interaction with students when they outperform you? Maybe you have something to advise your colleagues in situations like this?

Thank you for your replies!