Re: Championship Location Announced
 

Given that you've shown the ratio varies wildly from region to region and year to year, what causes you to draw this conclusion? Don't you think there are other factors in play?

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

I'm drawing this conclusion based on the updated number of seats HQ assigned to our two 2013 district championships. I expect the number of seats awarded to our four 2014 district championships will keep pace at around 1 team in 7.7-7.8. Maybe I'm wrong, but thats what I'm expecting.

Anybody know if the number of qualifiers from MI, MAR, PNW, and NE are announced for 2014 yet?

Ontario will roughly keep pace with the 1 team in 4 rate in 2014, with 5 regionals qualifying 30 teams, from an estimated 115-120 competing.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

The qualification of district teams is supposed to follow that region's percentage of total FRC teams=the same percentage of team's at championships. So, let's say MAR is 10% of all FRC teams and there are 400 teams at championships, MAR should have 40 qualifying spots at championships.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

As several other people have mentioned, due to the large average size of FRC teams along with the volume of teams at CMP, we're approaching the maximum capacity of any city to host the event. I don't think you can take many more than 400 teams to a single city to compete due to the physical limitations of the city itself, I can't think of very many places that can handle a regular population influx of 25,000+ people in one week. Instead of increasing the size of CMP I think the only solution (as previously mentioned) is adding another layer of qualification, e.g. super regionals. Looking at other highschool sports their qualification ladder goes something like this:

divisions --> sections --> regions --> states --> nationals --> worlds.

FRC could adapt a similar method with districts --> regionals --> CMP.

I hope I'm not being redundant but I'm just casting my vote.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

His point is you'd have a really hard time setting up stands in a convention center at the scale required. You're basically constructing an arena. This is from Einstein in 2002 when championships was 290 FRC teams, no FTC, and far fewer FLL teams. Think about how much bigger that has to be to accommodate basically twice as many people.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

Certainly this is the direction things will have to go long-term. Until we get more districts online though, this isn't a workable solution.

I don't believe that we've reached the maximum feasible size for CMP.

I agree there are few places that have the space and the ability to deal with the influx of people a bigger CMP would require.

I would say, actually that there is just two. Orlando, and the OCCC, or Atlanta, and the GWCC/Georgia Dome.

Examining dual-field divisions a bit further:

I think we all agree that GWCC had significantly more space than we needed for the pits. Enough to easily house up to ~600 FRC teams, plus FLL and FTC, still with room to spare.

This:
Attachment 15282

Is an NFL-football field (large rectangle, 360x160ft), with 12 FRC-field sized areas (40x70ft) drawn on it. The truth of the matter is that the floor of both the EJD and the GD are significantly larger than an NFL field, so things wouldn't be quite this cramped.

While Einstein is being used for FLL, it could be curtained off from Archi and Curie to reduce noise pollution. Then for the Einstein rounds, some of the Archi and Curie seating can serve dual-duty with the curtains dropped.

In 2013, we played 134 matches per division, with an average cycle time of 7:03, with 100 team divisions.

Each team played 8 matches, except 4 per division who each played a surrogate match.

With a match cycle time of 7:03, there is no reason to believe that achieving 200% of a single field's matches is impossible, but for sake of argument, lets say you achieve 194%. 260 matches, at 6 teams/match, and 130 teams/division = 12 matches per team. 520 team CMP capacity AND everyone gets 12 matches, without extending the length of the event. For what its worth, 7:03 cycle times is the longest cycle times CMP has had since 2008.

Everyone cites a limited number of volunteers as a sticking point for a bigger CMP. I don't see that as a problem. Bigger CMP, means more teams, means more people to volunteer.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

Bigger CMP doesn't mean more teams to have people volunteer...many team's bring what is considered a "skeleton crew" compared to what they bring to regionals/districts. And just because there are more volunteers(many teams don't bring people/have people strictly volunteering at Champs...) doesn't mean there are more trained volunteers...that's the challenging part. With an additional field you need additional FTAs, Head Refs, head Queuers, scorekeepers, Field Supervisors, inspectors, etc. All positions that require significant training. Not to mention that with the double-field structure, what happens if one field has technical issues? This could essentially derail the entire competition. The reason there were so few matches/team this year at championships was due to the significantly longer reset time compared to past years.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

Except you don't. That's the whole point of a double-field division, and not going to an 8 division format. A dual-field division only needs one set of refs, one set of scorekeepers, one set of field resetters. It really only needs some additional queuers, and some additional crowd control volunteers. Most of the additional volunteers needed are relatively untrained positions.

And this is different from a single-fielded division how? If anything, having 2 fields allows for some added fault-tolerance in this regard.

Agreed. The truth of the matter though, is that matches are 2:15 long. Match cycles since 2009 have always been in excess of 6 minutes, so my 200% argument should hold true.

FIRST had to make Championship Qualification matches start on Thursday afternoon to get 10/team in 2010 and 11, and just 9/team in 2012. We all agree that more matches is better.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

1. Refs need breaks in between matches and if you're having two seperate fields, they scorekeepers can't just keep getting up and walking back and forth between scoring tables(the people at the scoring table are what I define as scorekeepers, different years have allowed different definitions).

2. There IS more room for error. 2 fields allow for less tolerance because it implies the solution to a field fault can't just be "play on another field" or "play through matches on one field while the other field sorts out it's issues" because then that could mess with match separation.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

That's an unwarranted assumption. I'm pretty sure the original district-based region quota was based on how many Regional competitions it replaced, not on how many teams it involved. Besides, what is true right now might not be true later. There are rumblings of a significant revamping of how merit-based qualification might change in the near future.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

So you have a few extra. I know from the fields I've volunteered on they had a few extra. The goal here is to require less than 200% of the volunteers.

I envision this as being done with a single scoring table, connected to two sets of field hardware. I agree, walking back and forth would be silly. The two fields would need to be connected in order to generate sensible rankings anyway.

CMP already has no ability to easily switch over to "play on another field". Yes, technically Einstein sits there set up, and they keep a spare field on a truck in the loading dock, but the reality is that to switch anything like that out is a non-trivial operation.

As long as the sequence of the matches is respected, match separation should be unaffected by playing through on the working field.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

What [US] sport(s) actually follow that format all the way through a national tournament, let alone a world championship event? For the most part, there aren't "official" high school sports championships beyond the state level, and only rarely are there actual competitions/tournaments to decide them. For instance, the High School football national champion is typically decided by a poll.

While the appeal of that format is obvious, there are significant challenges that it poises as well. The financial costs and time comittments to teams, volunteers, and FIRST/planning comittees increase with each level of competition added. For many teams, it's simply not feasible to compete four or five times in a single season.

The appeal of that structure is obvious, and the logic behind it is easy to follow. But there should also be a parallel discussion. Rather than adding layers of competition, when is it time to start removing them? At what point is a "champioship event" simply not feasible? At what point is it no longer the best return on investment for the time and cost sunk into it by the participants, sponsors, and volunteers? Would FRC benefit from more of a "world festival" event similar to FLL?

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

You are correct that the original system was that a district sent they same number of teams as did the traditional regionals that the district replaced. However in that time FiM continued to grow and grow, so for the 2013 season they and Mar got a percentage of the available slots (less those dedicated for pre-qualified teams, I assume) based on the percentage of teams their district represents.

That is why FiM had sent 18 teams until the 2013 season when they sent 27 teams. Mar sent 12 teams their first year based on replacing 2 regionals but for the 2013 season they sent 14. I am expecting to see something similar happen this season so I don't expect that the districts will know exactly how many teams they will send until after the payment date.

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

I think your missing a couple things here, First yes bigger CMP means more teams, but that doesn't necessary mean more volunteers. Many of the people that volunteer are coming regardless of if their team does or not.

Now about the adding more fields,
Einstein there leaves no VIP area to see the field. Thats been addressed here before, the VIPS will get the good seats so that doesn't work.

Where is the stage and floor seating going?

Yes you've managed to cram the fields in but you've left less than 10ft between fields assuming the stadium is 50ft longer than the football field.

The tunnel to the convention center isn't centered on a long side so that spacing doesn't really work out.

Here's a map of the dome floor from last year. Laying the fields out the way you have just isn't reasonable
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/at...8&d=1366812834

Re: Championship Location Announced
 

I think you're forgetting that I've oversized the areas by a fair margin. An FRC field is 27x54ft, and the area I allocated for each field was 40x70. Additionally, an NFL football field is 57,600 square feet. The Georgia Dome advertises 106,000 ish square feet of floor space.

Yes, it would be tight. I think its possible.