Re: Registration 2013
 

Remember that the district system comes with new district events. Perhaps your team could sponsor a district event, so your first event would have distance 0. That happened in MI - the first year we started districts, there was one in Traverse City. There were only 2 teams in town, and another handful within a 1-2 hour drive. Yet it served as a catalyst for growth. In a smaller town, a FRC event is a big media event, and it was well publicized. There are several teams now in NW Lower MI that were started since we went to districts.

Truly remote areas do have travel problems; our friends in the UP can attest to that. Districts are not the perfect solution, but something will have to be done as the number of FRC teams continues to grow. Districts provide capacity, and also provide for growth in areas that have few teams now. Why doesn't Iowa have a dozen or more teams?

Re: Registration 2013
 

In my estimation, the district system doesn't have a major impact on driving distance from Iowa. We'd probably be going to Kansas City, St. Louis, etc, which are the same places we're going anyway.

I would be pretty happy to get into a district system because of the lower cost per event. I'd be sad to lose some of the current flexibility to travel in any direction to a regional event, but in the end we might retain that if everything goes district.

Re: Registration 2013
 

Right now there is an abstract "eye test" one could use to determine whether or not a given area has adequate density for the district system. A think an obvious case would be Georgia and the Carolinas, which is an area that supports 3 regionals that fill up very quickly and have a team population larger than MAR, but I don't know what, if any metric would be used to determine if that area would be dense enough. Sure ,some teams will have long travel times, but so do some teams in FiM and MAR. I don't know the point at which it's too thin to be feasible.

I like to think at some point district events won't have to be tied into certain regional or state championships, but you register saying you want points to be tallied for eligibility for an available regional or state championship event so you can maintain flexibility some rural teams may need while still moving over to the low cost district format.

I feel like regions should be competing against each other to have the best representation possible at CMP. When MAR and MSC teams are playing twice as many matches as my team for the same price, I would like to do something to level that ASAP.

Re: Registration 2013
 

I found that straight teams per square mile works well to compare two areas when I was seeing how New England measured up to Michigan. Doing a quick calculation for the area you described, the 3 states together have about .88 FRC teams per 1,000 square miles. In Michigan, the number is 2.16 teams per 1,000 square miles. While I wouldn't take that to directly translate to readiness to go to districts, it is definitely a factor.

Re: Registration 2013
 

Ah now I see, I must have read too quickly.

Re: Registration 2013
 

Anthony's talking about down south, not New England:

Re: Registration 2013
 

This is a problem we have with 229 and 4124 at Clarkson.

Tab over really quick and google-map "Potsdam, NY". We normally attend either Rochester, or a New England event, because those are the things in the closest driving distance - Rochester is 4 and Manchester is 5 - (barring Canada- of which Montreal is 1 hour away, GTR E/W are 5 hours away...We have a lot of students who live on the reservation up here, and crossing the border can get very complicated)

Assuming New England and Rochester/Ohio each become districts of their own... We don't fall into either.

So, where do we go?

Re: Registration 2013
 

The first year of FiM saw team density at 1.36 per 1000 sq mi for what it's worth, but I agree that might be one to look at. I guess another one might be # of teams located within an x-mile radius of a proposed venue.

Re: Registration 2013
 

I don't think I made this apparent in my post, but I am in favor of the District system. I want more matches. I want to attend multiple events. I want to see more teams in FIRST because the barrier to entry is lower. What I wanted to bring up though is that many of the benefits of going to a District system aren't there for rural teams or when clusters of teams are very far apart from each other. The District system may be new in name only if few of the teams in these areas can afford the travel costs to go to the 2nd event that they now have free entry into and it doesn't produce any closer events for them.

This was the only thing I could think of that FIRST could do right away to make Districts have a noticeable benefit in some of the more rural areas. I wasn't aware that they did that with success when FiM started, they may not need another strategy if that works as well in other regions.

The low quantity of teams in the Mountain West and Northern Plains is largely an issue of population and density. Iowa as a state has 3 million people and they're spread out over a fairly large region; a list of high school sizes I pulled up shows only 18 high schools with more than 1500 students and 42 high schools with more than 1000 students. If you had a FIRST team in every one of them it wouldn't be a problem but given the typical rate of FIRST teams relative to total high schools in a state the numbers just work out to a low total. The lower population density also means there are less businesses in any given area to be potential sponsors, and less potential mentors, etc.

Two things working in Iowa's favor:
1. Iowa launched a STEM initiative this year that more or less covers the cost of competition for FLL and FTC teams. There has been an explosion of growth in both of these programs in a few years, and I would suspect it could spill over into more FRC teams in the future.
2. Iowa has a really strong manufacturing base, so I feel that the percentage of the population that are engineers or some sort of skilled trade is higher than in some other states (just a personal observation).

Who doesn't want twice as much competition time? I'm all in for it.

For the current teams we have the District system would be nice as long as a few of the nearby events were options (this year all of the nearby events filled up before second regional registration opened). If students split up pretty evenly between the two events the travel costs would probably be about the same. I don't think the District system will start many new teams here unless a closer event ends up forming though.

Re: Registration 2013
 

Gary already mentioned this, but that sounds exactly like what happened to the teams in the UP of Michigan. From Houghton (farthest teams from the lower peninsula) to the Traverse City district is about 6 hours, and the next closest district is 8 hours.

As the district system expands, remote teams will have to go somewhere, and it probably won't work in their favor. It's not as big of an issue in MAR, since the region is small in size. When (if) larger states start moving to districts, it's going to be a more widespread issue, and there's no way to make it fair (easy travel) for everyone. The best thing that can be done is starting up district events farther away from the central "hub" of teams for the region (which is Metro Detroit, in Michigan), if possible - it encourages the other teams to travel and still gives students the opportunity to experience the fun of a travel event, which the district system has kind of taken away. And, as Gary mentioned, it encourages growth in the less dense areas.

Re: Registration 2013
 

There's been talk of allowing the teams from the Albany area of New York to join the New England district system, since some of them usually attend New England events. Seems like the obvious solution to teams with no local events, allow them to do what works best for them.

Re: Registration 2013
 

An update.
Currently showing 2548 teams.

Things have slowed, but not stopped.
Some events are still adding and dropping onesies/twosies.

Since formal registration closed on December 6...

• 37 new teams have added in - after Dec 6
  • 20 of the post-Dec 6 added teams above are rookies
• 49 teams registered on Dec. 6 have dropped out
  • 22 of these dropped teams from Dec. 6 were rookies

These numbers don't count some teams that added in after registration closed and then subsequently dropped out.

So, the registration total for this season has dropped by a dozen teams so far. Last night we did get two more teams though, so we're not done yet.

Re: Registration 2013
 

Looks like Lake Superior & Northern Lights just swapped 6 teams around (3 from each) to balance things out I suppose.

One pre-qualified team (842) dropped off the Championships team list.
I hope it's only temporary.

Re: Registration 2013
 

FiM has begun assigning third District slots by assigning 9 for the Bedford District (the one with all the space left).

One Michigan team dropped out of Waterford & Livonia to make it 208 Michigan teams this year.

Overall, FRC has 2540 registered teams right now.

Re: Registration 2013
 

Another team (23) dropped off the list for Championship.

The Michigan Bedford event is still being filled with 3rd district event teams.

Total teams has been unusually volatile after registration closing this year.
I'll add a graph later tonight.