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Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
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Some numbers to back this up would be good, but this is the feeling I have about it. |
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I really think this is a big step in the right direction.
I've never publicly stated this, but my current "dream" situation is: - for all districts to agree upon a common points system for qualification to their DCMPs, and the CMP - district teams can then compete at any district event outside their "home" district and still earn points towards qualification - points from your 2 best competitions count towards your DCMP/CMP points - teams are free to declare which district they want to be a part of (i.e. a Calgary team could declare to be a part of PNW, instead of a Canadian District.) This means they would be earning points to qualify for the PNW DCMP they declared for, not matter where they actually compete. The big downside is the possibility of teams trying to compete in weaker districts events to make qualifying for DCMP/CMP easier. This was a weakness of the Regional model too, but I'm not sure it was ever that big of an issue. Several Canadian teams (including 610) have competed in plenty of US regionals in an attempt to qualify for CMP "more easily", and we never felt unwelcome. Would teams declare for a Canadian district, and compete in two non-Canadian district events? Maybe. Would the rest of the teams in Canada be angry if that happened? Maybe. Have you always been able to "buy an easier route to CMP?" Maybe. There's a lot of upside too. We like being able to travel under the Regional model. Normally we do one local event, and travel to another. We would be able to do this again. I would love to have MI, NY, OH, PA, etc, etc teams come to Canada like they used to. With the lower district registration fees, this becomes a reality again - maybe even more so than under the Regional model! You might say we can already travel under the current district model, but it would require teams to compete at least 5 times: 1st local district, 2nd local district, 3rd outside district, DCMP, CMP. We are a team that is attempting to manage teacher/mentor/student burnout very carefully, and 5 competitions in a single season is not possible for us - I know this is the case for a lot of other Canadian teams. From a growth standpoint for FRC, there are also a lot of benefits: If you want to start a district event, you no longer really care what district you are a part of, or whether team is "local" or "outside". You run your event, award points to all the teams, and that's it. You probably want to ensure your local teams get spots before outside ones first, however. If you want to create a NEW district, all you need to do is create a DCMP, declare how many teams will compete at it, and how many qualification spots for CMP it will produce. The onus then is on teams to declare whether that will be their "home" DCMP and earn points to qualify for it. They will put a lot of thought into it, and figure it out accordingly. Already, the physical boundaries of the current district model has a few of us asking some tough questions. In Canada, where should our West Coast teams go? Should Ontario and Quebec be in the same district? Or not? A less geographically-bound system, seems very appealing to me, and would allow for even greater growth down the road. |
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I am curious to see what our growth numbers will look like under a District model! |
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*for debates sake let's just assume that alliance selections lead to the top 24 teams being picked. |
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Edit: Oops, replied to the wrong post. Was replying to the idea that 3rd event teams are undesirable. |
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This new set up will spread "3rd" event point grabs throughout the season instead of concentrating them in week 5&6. It will also help fill week 1 which is sometimes hard to fill. |
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But as far as I can tell, teams still use the first two in-district events that they compete at for points, not the first two in-district events they register for. So while registering for an out-of-district event in Week 1 won't earn them any points, registering for an additional in-district event in Week 1 will (regardless of when they registered for it). In this sense, teams at extra in-district events are getting "3rd plays," while teams at extra out-of-district events are getting "additional events." Is this correct? If so, then "the Bedford problem" (wow that sounds really bad...) is only partially alleviated by this. |
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The best way to view OOD play is as a 'third-district', only chronology of your events doesn't matter. |
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I'm still rooting for IL-IN-OH (and perhaps KY) to join forces to make a large pool of district events. They all have the same state bird, making the "Cardinal" name obvious for the region. |
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The unfortunate thing about that issue is that it works both ways: additional plays lead to points that could have helped other teams being removed, but at the same time (and this is just speculation, I've never done the actual math to see if its true) it likely will also raise the cutoff for DCMP by some amount.
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If one of these teams qualifies for world champs, do they decline since it's not in Chicago? If they do, I assume that would similarly decline an invitation to the district championship. If not, then maybe they would have the option of accepting an invitation to the District Champs even if it were outside the city. |
Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
*Note, everything below is hypothetical/personal observations. I don't have any actual knowledge of Illinois FIRST or Chicago teams decisions or input.*
TL/DR Summary: I am personally in favor of the switch to districts. However, I think Illinois has some hurdles to overcome first. Mainly the increased cost for many teams and the geographic distribution of teams in Illinois. Quote:
1)Illinois had 30 teams in 2014, or over 50%, who attended only 1 regional. Under districts those teams must come up with anadditional $4,000 (or $5,000?) for DCMP registration if they want to make it to CMP. Within those 30 teams, 13 are located within the city of Chicago. If one of those teams qualified for DCMP, they now need to come up with an additional 4 or 5,000 as well as travel costs for DCMP. (Since I'm doubtful the rest of the state would be happy with 2 districts and DCMP in Chicago). 2) All teams from the rest of the state must now travel to Chicago for at least 1 district. This includes about 9 teams from closer to Saint Louis who now have travel costs for 2 districts. No matter where the districts and DCMP were located, if Illinois switched for the 2015 season a decent amount of teams in Illinois would feel they are getting screwed and I predict our FRC team numbers would decrease from the 59 teams in 2014. As I said earlier, I personally want districts to happen but I also personally don't believe Illinois is ready yet. |
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(all distances in miles) MAR: 17, 23 NE: 20, 35 FIM 20, 41 PNW 31, 55 IN: 35, 65 Blah blah blah, straight line distances, blah blah treated earth as a sphere with constant radius which is TECHNICALLY incorrect but close enough for government work. |
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My biggest personal concern in this discussion is what happens to Wisconsin teams. We're already in a rough spot this year. Our team is based out of Catholic schools, so week 6 events, like Midwest, conflict with Holy Week. We could attend a Week 1 in Duluth, a Week 2 in Pittsburgh, a Week 3 in Kansas City, or a Week 5 in Cleveland. The shortest drive that we're looking at is 6 hours, even though there will be several close events that we can't attend because of scheduling. Boilermaker is now off the table, and with Midwest, Central IL, Twin Cities, and Duluth potentially off the table over the next few years, we might either have to get used to driving a lot or try to start at least 20 new teams. A Wisconsin-Illinois combined District doesn't make sense, because both states have a lot of teams centered around their biggest cities and then scattered teams that would have to drive a lot to attend their second event and the DCMP. |
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[Warning, the following will sound like gibberish to most folks] Data was generated by putting your team locations file into a postgis database. I then geocoded all the events and placed them in another table. From there, in a fit of deciding I genuinely hated databases, I joined team each team to every event and computed a travel distance using postgis ST_Distance_Sphere. After storing the resulting table I was able to query to find the nearest 2 events for all district teams. In retrospect I should have used ST_Distance instead. I think, however, that when I created my events table I used the wrong SRID on the event's location Point and as such had to do some translation that I was not feeling up to at the time. So, I could get more accurate results but I'm fairly certain that the minor inaccuracy in miles is less important than the inaccuracy caused by the fact that it computes distance as the crow flies. |
Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
I think the error due to the oblate spheroid approximation would be maybe .3% at most, so don't obsess about it.
At the greatest distance, that you happen to be dealing with, you'd see a different of 1000 feet or so. Much less than the accuracy of the numbers you published. |
Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
I think we'll see a lot of district teams on Einstein this year. The average regional team just can't get the same amount of drive time without investing a lot into a season.
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I am willing to bet a corndog that some regional teams might even be willing to pay $1000.00 for the privilege of playing at a regional even if they were excluded from qualifying for Champs at said event just to test their robots, drivers and strategy. |
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2014: 254-Regional *469-District **2848-Regional ***74-District 1678-Regional *1114-Regional **1640-District ***5136-Regional 2590-District *1625-Regional **1477-Regional ***3467-District 67-District *973-Regional **2481-Regional ***2363-Regional So looking at last year we have 6/16 slots held by district teams or 37.5%, Alliance captains were 50%, First picks 25%, Second picks 25%, Third Picks 50% so in terms of the teams who actually played on Einstein it drops to 4/12 or 33%. I am not sure that this change will cause that big of an issue, and I plan on checking to see if this hold true in other games. Breakdown of Einstein Locations for 2014: California-4 FiM-3 MAR-2 Illinois-2 Texas-1 Ontario-1 Texas-1 NE FIRST-1 Virginia-1 |
Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
At least for MAR, which has been consistently putting teams on Einstein every year since its foundation, none of the Einstein teams participated in third plays that year.
I think that the majority of teams who do four events will be within the district or trying to qualify for champs at outside regionals (of which we we had more teams than we did allocated point slots last year) |
Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
When discussing districts and Einstein appearances, it's important to note that Michigan was incredibly successful at reaching Einstein prior to districts as well.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=77045 |
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Barring any surge in new team registration before 3rd event and inter-district registration opens. |
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To me (a student on a regional team from Wisconsin), one of the huge advantages I saw to districts was that it was unbelievably fair.
For the registration fee of 1 regional, you got all the qualification possibilities of someone who went to 3 districts. The unbag time was the same, etc, etc. This is untrue in regionals. You can attend as many as you can sign up for, and you get a shot at each one. You can buy robot work time and chances at championships, (i suppose with waitlist, you can buy trips to championships too, so this argument is weak...). Now, with this new thing, you can go to a week 1 or 2 district somewhere else and get your robot tuned up before you compete for real. You've bought robot work time; an advantage over teams with less money. This isn't a huge disadvantage to the system, and its probably worth it, and my opinion means nothing, but its the first thing I thought when I read this thread. Another thing. Switching to the district model, having everyone in it, and having all district interdistrict play count would essentially end up with what we have now, with one more tier of competition, except the districts are held mostly in gyms, and we lose much of the spectator aspect we've been working so hard to build. |
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Eventually everyone will be all districts and I'll tell you why by using West Virginia as an example. What happens to us when PA, OH, National Capital Area, NC, and SC, and TN go to districts and we are not included? That puts our CLOSEST regional 10-15 hours away. With "pockets" of regional teams who have to pay 5 times as much to travel 5 times as far only to get much less playing time, these teams will either join a district or leave FIRST. We're already starting to see team's regional options diminish, as someone pointed out above in MN. You essentially stifle growth by marginalizing teams from areas with lower "density" of teams. It puts WV at an even greater disadvantage than it already is. It is essentially punishing us for not having enough teams, but makes it more difficult for teams to start. However, if we were lumped into a nearby district region, say PA or OH (or both) we would be better off. All districts in the US will eventually happen out of necessity as FRC continues to grow. |
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I'm not going to try discounting what you're saying, but I'm going to be very blunt when I say that FRC is, by its very nature, not supposed to be "fair". There are some mechanisms in place to bring in balance, but the only equal opportunity you get in FRC is that every team has to pay at least $5000 for the privilege of getting a couple boxes of stuff in January and a taped square on a gym floor in March. Everything after that is whatever your program can achieve on its own merits, for better or for worse. |
Re: [FRC Blog] Inter-District Play for 2015
Does anyone have a list, or know where to find one of teams registered for inter district play? I know team 190 is coming to the PNW Philomath regional (from NW England) and I'm curious to see what other teams are participating in interdistict play.
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*Note: 503 dropped out of the Indianapolis district after MikeE's original post, so I removed them from the list above, while 1923 is now officially registered for the Tech Valley Regional and has been added to the list. |
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