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The top-tier teams got to that level because they cared about winning the competition, and they strived to make themselves better in order to achieve that goal. If you look at the top teams in FRC and think, "Man, I want our team to be like that some day," then you better start caring about winning.

That competitive spirit is the single best kickstarter in making your team better, and it's why I believe so strongly in the integrity of this program's competition. The decision to split the championship in two compromises that integrity. It's detrimental to the success of the program, and that's why you've seen this magnitude of backlash here in this thread.

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Maybe they got too caught up in the "profit" part of "FIRST the non-profit".

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I think we both have similar viewpoints on this. I may have misinterpreted the original poster's statement as winning meaning receiving a trophy or medal.

Teams should have goals that they set and try to achieve each year in order to make them the best they can be, and to do their best at inspiring students. But, I think for the purposes of measuring success, it should be based on their own standards, not the metric of being the best at a competition.


To some of the points about the number of winners vs cheapening the feeling of winning, I think FIRST is trying to figure out the best balance of this. Look at high school sports, how they are separated based on divisions. They choose to separate into divisions based on school size, and have different winners for each division. Even though there are multiple winners for a sport, they all feel the same sense of accomplishment.

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• We mentor to inspire.
• We build to learn.
• We dedicate hours to achieve.
• We play to win.

That last two parts just became a whole bunch goofier.

• We dedicate hours to achieve.*
• We play to win.*

Why would any sport...and I believe FIRST is a sport, add an * to their winners?

I heartily disagree with change and recommend they look at the commercial successes of other sports, other competitions, other places where people dedicate themselves to achieve greatness and play with all of their soul to to be the best. Because that is where the love, the passion, the emotion, the character and the memories are born. Those are the moments that people strive to achieve and cherish for a lifetime. Those are the accomplishments that make people think they can be better and motivate them to do more.

Please don't add an * to FIRST.

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if they really want to be more accessible they should do an east west format.

So think of it like this.

Have east championships for everything east of the mississippi and west championships for everything west of the mississippi. International teams could choose which one they attend.

Then have the world championships in st.louis with only 1 half of each teams from each divisional.

Its more expensive for the really good teams but they most likely have the funds to do both where as it is much cheaper for the bottom half teams.

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Not going to sift through 33 pages of responses on this issue, so apologies if this has been brought up before.

Do I agree with this change? No, I don't like it currently. My perception could change, and there have been plenty of other changes FIRST has implemented over the years that were met with varying degrees of negative reactions (alliances, districts, serpentine draft, etc) that are now staples of the FRC experience.

High school sports generally don't have widely recognized national champions. Even NCAA football has had split national champions, and only this year finally implemented a playoff system. While FRC obviously doesn't have the widespread appeal of those sports as cultural institutions at this point, I'm not convinced crowning a singular champion is essential to that. And it's not like the current system even does a particularly great job at having the "best" team win every year. The elite teams are aware of the amount of luck involved in the tournament. Match schedule, division placement, alliance selection, tournament match-ups and a slew of other factors have led to many of the consensus "best" individual teams being eliminated in Championship events over the years. The simple fact that it's an alliance-based tournament adds massive amount of uncertainty to the process of crowning the best teams.

I don't agree with this currently, but I'm not going to line up to throw tomatoes at FIRST just yet.

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I wonder if this will be the day that FIRST died? Time will tell.

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This whole thread reads like the five stages of grief.

Denial (April Fools!)
Anger (how could they do this to us?!)
Bargaining (Let's make posters and shirts and call HQ!)
Depression (FIRST is going to die)
I'm confident that most people will find Acceptance in the end.

There's also a lot of cognitive dissonance happening.

Change is hard. Transitions are difficult. Especially when we aren't part of the decision making process.

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Nevermind my post about getting the mentors out of a rut, now how do I keep my students interested? Just yesterday, we met to make our team goals for 2016.

I guess we need to set new goals...

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This

In 2012 we got to championship by winning a regional, but so many teams get there by other means that it is easy for a first-time championship team to get overlooked and not taken seriously. I don't want to diminish anyone's experience, but when everybody wins, what is the significance of winning? It's starting to sound like rec league soccer...everyone sign up to bring a snack at one of the events, and when you get to championship...here's your trophy and here's your Capri Sun.

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They won't provide Capri Suns...if they did perhaps it would fly. No its just another $5000 check. Where does that money go?... its ridiculous the costs to attend multiple events especially at future less competitive championships. Ridiculous.

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I am surprised at how many of the responses are opposed to change. FIRST is an evolving changing beast and there are bound to be changes. Question is was this where change was needed at this time. As a four year lead mentor I can say my team thouroughly enjoyed our Rookie All-Star trip to Championships. We'd love to go again some day but winning there is not as high on our list of things to do as it appears to be with many on this thread. More important is spreading STEM through robotics and having a good time.
A shorter, more relaxed, less competitive version of what exists now might enable some mentors to stay around longer annd some teams to feel more satisfaction. For example; a 'league' where each team can attend if they compete with the robot tbey built as of bag day. No multiple events and therefore no multiple 30 pounds of goodies that permit some to arrive at Championship with a robot that is no longer what came out of the build season. The emphysis is put on getting it right the first time.
The idea being to keep some sanity in the number of months people have to put in. There are a lot of people working as mentors whose involvement grows exponentially with each passing year; turning the mentor positions into what look like full time jobs. This translates into well mentored teams but questionable home life. Money needs to be raised for each added event along with the time commitment. For team members attending multiple events it means more missed school days. I'll stop there but I think that FIRST in general and all teams individually need to question the amount of time and energy they devote to their seasons; attempting to keep some balance of reason so we don't get burnout while trying to effect positive change in our youth.

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Nailed it! I think they should use either the FTC Super Regional model or the District model.

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GROWING PAINS:
FIRST Programs are growing. This is wonderful. There is not a city which can handle the championship as it currently set up. All of us need to understand this. I appreciate the efforts to address the situation.

I believe many worthy teams cannot afford to attend a regional, a super regional, and finally, a championship in FRC, as it is often suggested.

It may be too late, but here are a two possible solutions to consider.

1. Have the FLL and FTC Championships at one location/city and the FRC Championship at another. This would free up space and hotel rooms.

2. Have the FLL and FTC Championships one weekend and the FRC Championship in the days and weekend following in the same city. (All groups will not all be there at once.) Lengthening the event and spreading out the use of hotel rooms and facilities.

These ideas may have already been evaluated, and certainly will have other problems associated with them, but perhaps they are worth giving additional consideration.

Thank you for trying to come up with a solution which benefits all parties and provides more students with FIRST opportunities. It is a difficult task,understandably. I am confident it will all work out eventually. Best wishes to all!!

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I would just like to point out that I think this is one of the fastest growing CD posts to date, over 500 responses in 10 hours...:eek:

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I'm concerned about all the implications that this is money motivated. Who exactly are you people suggesting is being unfairly enriched by this? Cause it has to be someone.

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Seriously what message does dual championships send? Unless accompanied by a significant entry fee reduction?

Makes no sense to have two locations for < 600 teams or an expansion to 1000 unless entry fee driven.

If it walks like a duck....

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The goal is to have two events of 400 teams each. (Similar sizes to the 2014 Championship)

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Wow. This is sad.

How could FIRST not predict the overwhelmingly negative response? If they had sent an email to a few teams with the idea (maybe the hall of fame teams, they're supposed to be in contact with them, right?), they'd be better prepared for the stream of disapproval and complaining.

Why was this done without any sort of public discussion? There were many heated debates on CD and in real life about the merits of district competitions, but the district model was improved as a result. The same could be true for an expanded championship model.

Is the 2015/2016 St. Louis championship format so terrible that they're dropping it before they've even tried it?

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How ridiculous is that? Read what you wrote. Other than money grab.

Wasn't too long ago champs was capped at 400.

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Would this replace DCMPs in any area? i like this idea either way.

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What I read was to have two events of the 2014 size or two 400 team events.

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After I posted it, I went back and read that too. Post edited.

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Are you serious?

One method is to excel (in any aspect of life) at the cooperative aspect of what Woody likes to call coopertition.

Another thought on the subject would be to point out that in FIRST a team earns the Chairman's Award by exhibiting leadership in many areas, only one of which is doing well enough (not necessarily outstanding; but instead, just well enough) in the coopertition parts of FIRST.

Blake

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I think a small point to consider about FTC and FLL is that having them in the same place (or city) helps to "engulf" them in the incredible Champs experience. I would think (my own personal opinion) that FIRST did not like switching to the 600 team model for this year and next year because is forced FTC and FLL to other places, meaning they didn't get the same immersion they used to.
Even though recently there has been few FTC and FLL teams at Champs (compared to FRC), they are still giant programs (though not as big as FRC) that are growing at very fast rates. FIRST really doesn't want (my personal opinion) to forget about them.
CD is almost entirely current FRC participants (some FTC or dual) and it seems most of the opinions about this change reflect an FRC-centric mindset. I would think (my opinion) that FIRST wants FTC and FLL to have more significance at Champs, and 2 Champs probably doesn't mean too much to an FTC or FLL team (but to an FRC team...).

I agree with many that this decision is ripping the "C" out of FRC, demolishing what most of the inspiration for FRC has been built on for the past 25 or so years (pursuit of being the grand winner). It started with a competition, and everyone loves a competition. Add in some robotics, community outreach aspects, and GP awards, and you have inspiration FOR more than just winning, you are inspiring pursuit of science and technology (I would say a much more noble cause than a sport's pursuit of just winning). The problem is that with two Champs, the basic concept of a competition has been eliminated. What are we really playing for?
I have noticed from my time in FIRST that many people are hooked into the competition, because of the nature of it: it's a competition! But then people realize that there is much more: inspiration, mentorship, ect. But after you have found the "more", do you still need the competition? I would say that question is what polarizes the debate.
I would say many people still need the competition; it's what drives them to succeed, keeps you working in the shop, keeps mentors coming back each day. You realize there is more to it, and FIRST has done a great job making sure everyone realizes those aspects, but at the end of the day, this is the FIRST Robotics Competition, and that's what many people love about it.

Sidenote: Sorry, I was thinking about the FTC/FLL aspect, and wanted to add that point in, and then meandered into adding my $0.02.

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I'm also concerned by this attitude. Champs as the ultimate robot competition is depressing to me since to achieve this you need to:

1. Eliminate waitlists, and probably wildcards. They didn't win in so they shouldn't be there.
2. Eliminate advancing 2nd and 3rd picks. They're usually just along for the ride on the winning alliance.
3. Eliminate advancing chairman's, HoF, and EI robots. Their robot didn't get them there, so that would water down the competition.
4. Eliminate advancing RAS. Best rookie is still a rookie.
5. Eliminate advancing original and sustaining teams. Just cause you used to be good...

I mean, if we're serious about crowning the one true champion and all that.

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Do all that (in allowing those entries) and keep it in one city. It works. Two cities does not work... always a step-child competition. Is the world clamoring for 800 in champs?

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Right. So who are we proposing is inflating their salary and pocketing all that extra money? Unless you think they're funneling the extra money into FTC, FLL, etc. In which case why the outage?

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FLL and FTC subsidize FRC (and will for the foreseeable future). FIRST's financials tell us that much.

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I've always thought of the Championship Event as a Championship event. It is possible to have 2 Championsip events - or more. Much of the chatter in this thread makes me think the mindset is that of a National event that wants to have the Worlds title. The bigger picture is of a much broader and wider scope; an inclusive one. Imagine a Championship Event in Israel, Great Britain, China, Mexico, Brazil... Imagine the Awards given to prestigious members and teams of the FIRST communities in these countries and others. Imagine these members and teams in 2020, 2025, 2030... Not in 2015 where we bicker about the locations of 2 host cities in the USA only.

Much of the basis of the HoF teams has been a foundation of growing FIRST and STEM initiatives in our communities, creating a far-reaching impact. This has happened and will continue to happen. To put blinders on and deny growth and a legitimate need for change that reflects this very real growth and interest, is nothing less than hypocritical.

Since when has FIRST ever accepted/maintained the status quo? Since when have teams, mentors, and our FIRST community leadership chosen to maintain the status quo? This is just the beginning, I think. And it is exciting.

Jane

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My wife's suggestion for solving the problem of only ever seeing teams from your region at Champs is to let teams willing to travel sign up for a lotto to swap slots with a team at the other Champs. So you'd have a 50/50 chance at seeing a new set of teams that year. HQ probably wouldn't let teams just pick which Champs because of capacity and the risk of everyone picking Houston to make it the Premier event, but this would still allow for some inter regional mixing.

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I haven't read all 500 posts so I apologize if some of my ideas have already been said but to me, FIRST has a few options:

First, they could stick exactly to their current plan. To me, this is the worst option as now you'll only interact with half the teams in the world and instead of qualifying for a true championship, you basically qualify for a bigger regional.

The second option is to have the two championships but for them to culminate in a small event where one CCA winner is announced and one championship alliance is announced. This model would be scalable and the culminating event would be very spectator friendly, especially coupled with FTC and FLL. This still has the issue of region locking teams.

A third option would be for the first "CMP" to be similar to the NIT and the second to be like the NCAA tournament. This let's teams interact with other teams from all over the world but the NIT style event may not be the most inspiring.

A fourth option would be to have teams pick their CMP or have it randomly selected, this could culminate in a final event like in the second option.

I'm sure there are many other options but considering FIRST seems to be locked into these venues, these seem like the best options.

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After reading about 10 pages I stopped.

I agree with a lot of Veterans who spoke in those first 10 pages and hope FIRST listens to those who have been around for 10+ years and have been the real backbone of this organization (ex. mentors, volunteers).

I'm going to give FIRST a pass with the hopes of a real explaination of what the reasons for this and not going the way of the Super Regional like planed when districts were announced, as well as a financial reason outside of "this is going to save teams money" shenanigans.

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FRC in Michigan is going to be so cool! :D :D :ahh:

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I dislike the idea as it lowers the number of awesome robots I can see at champs. I want a good look at 148 and 1114 while I'm there this year, and other bots in other years.
More district championships, followed by one big champs event would be my choice. To allow more teams to come, we could try moving it around the world, at least when more countries become involved.

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Eliminating all of those teams that got to Worlds by means of awards and such is shunning a lot of teams that do not necessarily deserve to be shut out of the experience. Doing so wouldn't fix much and your solution is way far right on the spectrum while having two Champs is on the far left. It definitely doesn't have to be all or nothing.

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I think most of the kids (probably all of them) on our "middle-of-the-road" team would be just as happy, excited and inspired to go to a "half-worlds" championship, get to play with and be inspired by half of the best teams in the world, as to go to a true "World Championship." I can see both sides of that part of the argument. If this new arrangement actually accomplished that for a majority of teams, it might have SOME merit. Though a "super-regional" on the west coast would do just as well in that regard.

It's just a shame that their attempt to "lower travel costs" does absolutely nothing for the teams on the whole west side of the mainland US, not to mention Hawaii, Mexico, Australia, China, Japan, and the other teams we play with over here. Nor for teams in Europe/Israel/etc.

When I started reading the post, I thought - "Wow! Geographical split! They're finally going to have a championship event on the west coast! (Because west coast/east coast, or something similar - Detroit/Las Vegas, maybe? - was so obvious...) But then I read on.... You can't tell me that they couldn't find any city in the whole west side of the continent that could host this event???

This makes things easier for the MI/Toronto/NE/MAR teams only, as far as I can tell. Someone should figure out exactly what percentage of all the teams are benefited in any way by this, and ARE they the teams that really NEED that help the most? Does this actually benefit teams that are NOT currently attending champs BECAUSE of the travel cost? I'd like to see some data on that. Where are the teams who qualify for champs but can't go because of cost - are they in Michigan or NY? Or in Washington State, China, and Israel? Or in Florida? Just curious. I know if we'd qualified any year between 2011 and this year, inclusive, we would most likely not have been able to go, due to cost.

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While my initial reaction was very similar to many of those expressed earlier in this thread, I think there's something that we're missing, and that we need to reserve judgement until we find out what it is. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but Dave Lavery's post has made me believe that we're not seeing the entire picture, and that the final result will be better.

The sky, contrary to popular belief, is not falling.

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This might help. Posted wayyy back.

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This is not that bad. I don't think north or south will be "easy" to win due to not playing "half" the world. Districts would feel a bit better but we realy don't loose anything when you think about it. It's ambiguously unsettling because it's new and I like the alternative more. And yea it's more of a bummer when your shop is 5min from the former worlds location and the south championship is now 10hrs away. Thats all there is to it.

If you quit because of this you missed the point and maybe you shouldn't have joined up in the first place? Sponsors and aren't pulling out. Apparently FIRSTs sponsors are very on board or they couldn't afford two championships! Mentors share knowledge and show kids what engineering is realy like. If you are a mentor would you realy abandon your current and future students because you can't be the undisputed champ?

Why we are here now and why you shouldn't quit after 2016 is the same reason you do FRC and not just VRC/FTC in spite of the cost. The big robots are still realy cool and the amout of technical knowlage that can be attained is unrivaled for a high school program. Couple that with more sportsmanship and as much teamwork as any other sport and you have the best thing I've ever seen. Watchability is a fuction of team performance and that will go up naturally as more teams spring up and the field gets denser in the north and south.

I'd rather see districts but whatever. Now put it back in Atlanta!:p

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So FIRST's mission is to inspire as many young people to pursue STEM-related activities and careers as possible, right?

According to Dan Bossi in his announcement video, FIRST is different from other sports in that FIRST is more a celebration of every team's achievements and efforts. I remember somebody posting (I'm not going to even attempt to find the post) that because of more winners being crowned, CMP is becoming more like a science fair and less like a, well, competition/championship.

To me, this sounds like FIRST is trying to make FRC less of an actual sport. FIRST's desire to inspire as many people as possible is very understandable, but they're going about this the absolute wrong way.

It doesn't take a genius to know that major sporting events are much more popular than science fairs and conventions. How many kids dream of becoming a professional athlete someday? In contrast, how many kids dream of becoming a scientist that wins best-in-show someday?

In order to accomplish FIRST's main goal, robotics programs must become more like sports. Sports are universally popular, inspiring, and captivating. Yes, this means having one all-encompassing championship event and giving the title of "World Champion" to the best in the world. Why is this contrary to the mission of FIRST? It seems to have worked out for many sports programs.

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When most people say they are quitting, I don't think they mean quitting their robotics teams. I think they mean that they won't compete with their teams in FIRST anymore and instead compete in another competition such as VRC. There isn't anything wrong with that either. No one is obligated to stick to FIRST since it's not the only competition around that promotes STEM and they shouldn't be scrutinized just because they do switch. I'm pretty sure these mentors do get FIRST and if they believe competing in FIRST is no longer in their team's best interest, then there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, if a competition could end up discouraging teams so much that they end up leaving FIRST, perhaps there is something wrong with the decisions being made or that have already been made. I'm all for expansion but maybe the focus should be on districts and super regional instead of dividing championships.

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I don't know about you guys, but I don't really like this idea that much.

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First they create a game that completely eliminates all defense and direct competition among teams, lacking even winners and losers outside of the finals. Then they create a second world championship eliminating the prestige of winning worlds because only half of the best teams were there. First is quickly eliminating all the competitive elements from the competition that have driven teams to work so hard and fostered such a communal spirit of competitiveness

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Okay fine but crowning 6 champions out if 3,000 is NOT like giving everyone a trophy. I for one would be quite fine telling sponsors we did the best out of 2,994 other teams or 1,497 if you think of it as the half. We don't need to be a sport we need to show people how fun what we do is regardless format. There is so much more.

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It took me longer than it should have to figure out that the (Mercator?) projection is the reason the radius around Detroit appeared larger than the two others.

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What they are saying is they favor winning over the technical chalenge in FRC. Good riddance. I'll stick with the big robots.

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This is my thought too. I'm taking a Hanlon's Razor approach to it: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". Though, in this case I might change that last word to ignorance. Reader's choice.

I volunteered for a regional last weekend and it completely changed my perspective. There were many teams that were just happy that they finally got the stack of three they designed their robot for, or got a buzzer beater tote onto the scoring platform. It's about what the students can do, not about who else they can beat. If we're proud of them for winning, it's little different from a traditional sport. I'm proud of the robot that comes out at the end and all the work they put into learning how to make it.

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Who is saying VRC isn't a great technical challenge? Heck even on 842 we considered at one point to stop doing FRC and focus on AUVSI's Robosub competition because we thought it was a greater technical challenge and more affordable but ultimately decided on doing both. Would we have been scrutinized for that? And I don't say good riddance. I'd be sad to see so many teams leave.

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Well it sure sounds like it. And to be clear I still prefer the expanded district system. This is nothing to quit over however and I think FRC is a bigger technical challenge. Again why haven't you done VRC/FTC exclusively prior to this? The reasons for choosing FRC are not lost in this development.

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Repeating a lot of what has already been said, but:
-This degrades the significance of winning the championship. Why let the best alliance win when you can let everyone win, right? Wrong. The intensity, the inspiration of FIRST comes, in part, from winning. The feeling of victory in a challenging competition is something irreplaceable and by doubling the winners, that feeling will be diminished.
-This makes IRI a very, very important event. Only at IRI will the best robots in the world be able to compete together. If I were on the IRI planning committee, I'd be looking into larger/better suited venues, cause if this goes the way I think it'll go, IRI is going to become the new champs, at least for robot performance.
-This really doesn't help many teams. The large concentration of teams in Michigan will benefit once it's in Detroit, but, then again, it's not helping anyone else. It's going to be very amusing to watch all those trailers navigate Detroit's strange U-turn based infrastructure. (Clarification: detroit has right turns like normal, but instead of left turns, they have u-turn lights, where you turn around then make a right to your destination) It disregards the large concentrations of teams on the entire east coast, too.

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Doing what it takes to win is the technical challenge for many of us. The bar is raised every year thanks to these teams. I'll stick to the competition where they go, because in the process of trying to win, we'll be in a "technical challenge" of our own and we'll end up learning a lot on the way.

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Rampant speculation time! I'm going to go out on a limb and say the "compromise" (if FIRST calls it that) will be to convert these two Championships into the long awaited Super Regionals after the first couple years. It's just crazy thinking, but it would fit much better with what we have been expecting and, I think, be a much better solution that wouldn't require such a huge financial commitment up front.

The timeline is hard to reconcile with this idea though. The fact that this is still so many years away certainly isn't what I expected.

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555 posts and we could have done more! Let's see if we get some official dialogue tomorrow.

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By 2017 there could be somewhere in the neighborhood of 3600 teams. So each championship event will draw from a pool of about 1800 teams to award chairmans, EI, WFA, etc. Most people here seem to view this as a disaster, Id call it 2010. I was at worlds in 2010 and I don't think it was that bad. The sky wasn't falling from any part of the arena.
As far as awards go, The way I see it this affects 6 teams per year. There will be 2 winning alliances, but thats still a huge accomplishment. All the other awards will have the same value and importance as past years.
What did everyone expect, seriously, FIRST is getting bigger.

My 2 cents:)

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What's crazy to me is that, for once, the majority of people posting here actually seem to agree with each other.

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I haven't been around the block that long but the community has never gone full throttle like this. Also reps from three of the biggest and oldest and HoF/F&S team centers in FIRST have been at competition. I can only imagine what is going through the heads of those in the Mid Atlantic, Michigan, and New England brain trusts.

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Which championship will you be slicing oranges at?

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[sarcasm] If the games continue to be like Recycle Rush, two Championships makes total sense - each Championship only needs half of each playing field! Houston can be Red, and Detroit can be Blue, and the screens can show the feed from the other event![/sarcasm]

I do not like this.

But if we're looking for constructive suggestions, maybe FIRST can at least find ways to send the proper amount of teams from each event to these events. DCMPs send a % of teams equal to the % in the district - regional events should do the same. A 60 team event should be sending more than a 30 team event. Why not use the same district point structure to determine who the top % of teams are at a given event? Use the smallest event as your standard (if a 30 team event still sends 3 winners, EI, CA, and RAS, that's 20%..by comparison a 60 team event would then send those 6 that earn it plus another 6 that qualify based on points).

Here's something that really bothers me about these plans though:
The competition isn't even in the stadiums! The most impressive part of the Championship in its current form is getting to play in a huge stadium! Anyone who played on the pit fields in 2011 knows how much it sucked - now everyone gets that wonderfully uninspiring experience.

My last rant for the evening: If the purpose of two events is to allow more teams to get the championship experience, are both events going to have the same speakers, same ceremonies, same special guests, same entertainment?

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This seems to suggest that half of the world is not very competative. It also assumes no one will rise to the challenge presented by who is at the top of the region and that no new powerhouses will ever spring up. And when I say technical I mean the engineering of the robot. Winning is a function of that, driver training, scouting, strategy, co-op, luck, etc. I'm not following someone because they can't have their undisputed winner belt.

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just curious, what is a "flex event" as stated on the "First's Vision" link?

Also, I am not a fan of this change at all either. I like the super regional idea a lot more.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

I'm proud of myself for reading the whole thread before posting. I'm not sure how much of the thread I actually internalized, but seeing as its growing at levels almost exceeding that of game hint threads, at least I made it through. Those on CD sure do hold their opinions very close.

I am a senior on my team, and have been a member since 2012. My team made it to championships in 2013 on chairmans, and that experience was very transformational for me. It created that thirst to be the best, to put in countless extra hours, especially this year, when I wanted to return. My team didn't make it back, but thats beside the point. I can't pinpoint exactly what about world championships was so inspiring to me, the sea of hormones at roboprom, the intense competition, the people like me, the antics at the hotel. There are things in a championship event that are beyond the competition that probably still would have inspired me, but thats not really my problem with this decision.

What bothers me most about it is that they didn't talk to teams about it beforehand, y'know, before contracts were signed, especially such long contracts. I could see trying it out for a year and seeing if it works out. I understand details still need to be worked out, but huge decisions have been made without any community involvement. Frank has been doing such a great job being transparent with much of FIRST's inner workings, but this seems to have been a major slipup. Its placement right before current champs and during many DCMPs seems an attempt to slip it under the radar. I don't understand FIRST finances, and I understand I can look them up, but whenever I think about it, I can never figure out where the money goes.

There was community support behind the super-regional model posted here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/at...chmentid=18804 and I don't understand why this wasn't at least closer to the truth.

The cities chosen also don't make much sense to me. There was a map posted earlier with 750 mile circles drawn on it, and it looks to be horribly inconvenient for PNW and California, generally much of the west, as well as much of the far east, which is where I thought a majority of the teams were. Neither of these cities is super cheap to fly into, Houston ain't the worst, but detroit is pretty pricey, and only getting worse. Flying is what it appears most east and west coast teams will need to do.

There was an earlier suggestion about a small basketball arena for the true championship, to crown a real winner and a tongue in cheek suggestion about not invitiing chairmans, ei, HoF 2nd, 3rd picks. I think these ideas honestly work well together. Have your big flashy championship events, inspire the kids, and invite the best robots to a one weekend day, true championship. I don't have a good metric for picking "The best robots", but I would hope FIRST could scramble together the money to pay for those best robots(and a skeleton team) to get to ultrachamps. In a perfect world, these super exciting matches would be televised(at least web broadcast with enough bandwidth for everyone who wants to to watch), which would inspire the public, and keep FRC a sport.

On a different note, I can't speak for them, and they're certainly way too busy about now, but I'm really glad I'm not a Michigan volunteer once Detroit hosts a championship.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

European football teams are generally thrilled to keep playing, since the clubs make more money off of branded merchandise and ticket sales, and the players can increase their salaries and their open market value. High school students and volunteers might not do so well adding another week of time out of state and away from school.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Whew, so I just read through 38 pages of angry FIRSTers. Something I would never agree to before today. I'll keep my input regarding the implications of this decision to myself seeing as I've hardly known the news for 12 hours now. I ask only a few questions (I apologize in advance for the length of this rambling post - it's 12:30 am and I'm avoiding much needed sleep rn :D):

1. Why would FIRST announce this plan at this time? The morning of the first day of 3 DCMPs? It seems like possibly the worst time to do so. 2015 CMP is looming on the horizon - FIRST is probably busy organizing that, working out issues with teams who need help, etc. It seems like the logical time would either be a) at CMP 2015, where all the organizing and planning has been done, and the season is just days from ending or b) in the offseason, when FIRST is relatively dormant and can handle such a large community reaction (which I'm sure they saw coming with such a relatively vague announcement)
2. Speaking of vagueness, why would FIRST announce this plan with a seemingly small amount of information fleshed out? They've determined the broad scope of the event, but a lot of the finer details haven't been revealed/worked out. Now granted they might be looking for some community input before determining things like 2 Champion alliances, 2 WCAs, etc, but I feel like FIRST is pretty good at gauging what's good for the community without it's input (Aerial Assist, district model). I feel like they've revealed only the least appealing information - although that may be intentional, ripping off the metaphorical bandaid)
3. I only suggest CD members (and people not associated with the decision making process in general) to consider what you post in this thread - As a student it is by no means my job, duty, or responsibility to police what others say and post, but it appears some people are allowing their emotions to get ahead of themselves. We've known about this news for less time than some of us will spend building during one day of build season; let's cool it a little. I've seen posts in this thread talking about leaving FIRST altogether, starting revolts or petitions, etc. While I don't necessarily think those ideas are super far-fetched and out of the question (okay, maybe a little :p), I think we should wait until the changes are a) in the much nearer future and b) described in much more detail before jumping ship. FIRST has existed successfully for close to 30 years now - I hardly think they would make a decision so horrible that they start to lose all their members!

TL;DR: chill yo

(standard disclaimer about how this post expresses my personal views and my views only, not those of my team, school, city, etc etc)

Re: Future First Championship News
 

EXACTLY my thinking John! The FTC North SR was super amazing and fun. Why don't they have 4 "Super-Regional Events" (north, south, east, west) that incorporate all the programs (like champs does) to replace champs? This would make the most sense, as it would bring in teams that are more local to the area and reduce travel significantly (I think almost all of our teams drove to the North SR). I could see something really cool like this happening (allowing for quite a few more of the top-notch teams from each state/regional to advance further, and then invite like the winner/finalist to Manchester (or around there) for a "World Championship" type event. I think this would be quite a bit more intimate for the teams advancing to Worlds, but I think it would be cool to get FIRST back to it's roots.

EDIT: Also worth noting that the FTC Super Regionals most likely won't move, as they have secured sponsors who would probably prefer them to not move. Plus gracious sponsors like Rockwell Collins/John Deere/etc brings a lot of people to help out at events.

Also, for those who were complaining about cost... FTC SR only costs $500/team. Is there a reason why we can't get pricing down to this for teams? Maybe find more event sponsors who will underwrite/sponsor the venue?

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Over the past several hours, with numerous breaks, I have read over at last count 566 posts on 38 pages. So this post most likely will be covered over quickly as more folks continue to respond to this thread.
Missing from those pervious posts are any comments reference what the future impact might be on the current FRC timeline of a Kickoff in early Jan with a 6-1/2 week Build Season followed by a 7 week Regional-District Competition Season. In 2017, using the current FRC timeline, it seems that teams participating in any Week 7 events will only have a few days between the end of those events and the start of the ‘Houston’ FIRST Championship. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop reference the following issues:
1) What will be the effects of the scheduled/contracted 2017-20 FIRST Championship dates on future Kickoff dates and associated Build & Competition Seasons?
2a) Which District Championships & Regional events will feed into which FIRST Championship?
2b) Will those competition events and FIRST Championship alignments change every year or be some what consistent?

Re: Future First Championship News
 

500+ passionate posts from a group of usually very busy people on the subject of what is, to the outside world, a high school extracurricular activity...if we're not an amazing fandom I really don't know what is.

As someone who has worked to present FIRST as a form of entertainment for people inside and outside the program (which I think is consistent with the goals of FIRST) I have an issue with a narrative that lacks a satisfying conclusion. "One Championship event, bringing together competitors from around the world to have one shot at un-paralleled glory and prestige" is just a more compelling story than "two "Championship" events that bring most of the competitors from a certain area of the world to have a shot at equal prestige as that other competition". This just makes it more difficult to tell the story of the FIRST season, and that's already pretty difficult as it is.

Change is a fact of life. We grow, evolve, regenerate, and usually we move on, better than we were before. With the way FIRST is growing some sort of adjustment must be made, I think a majority of us agree with this sentiment.

Does this mean I like the changes they've made? No.

Is it driving me to quit the program? Probably not.

Have I become that annoying mentor who asks rhetorical questions to make a convoluted point? ...

I'm hoping that FIRST has a longer term plan for this system that addresses my concerns, but if they do I wish they would have made that clear when they made this announcement.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

I think getting FIRST back to it's roots in/around Manchester would be pretty cool and have FIRST HQ open to tours/etc (I don't know if you could do that with like 120 FRC teams ...)

Re: Future First Championship News
 

This has been my sentiment for a long time. I was just too chicken to say it. And this is from a team who has been to the CMP 9 consecutive years (counting this year) and all but two of them are for the reasons listed above so I think we know what it's like to get there by all means.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

9LONG post ahead, but I have something to say)

My personal opinion, based on current information: (sarcasm in italics)



Yup. That's what came to mind, for those who won. Yeah, you won. Won what? Doesn't matter, you won. Good Job This trophy feels cheap and looks familiar (sees a bunch of other teams with similar trophies)... Doesn't matter, you won

The way I see it is that FIRST seems to be looking to lower the bar rather than raise the floor. Champs is a big fun party... but it's champs. Where the best of the best are recolonized and more importantly, the model teams for others to emulate, follow, and gain inspiration from.

Sure, good teams will still be good teams either way, but awards are about giving credit where credit is due. It's the reason why when one wins, they are the ones that get the winner's trophy. This is why I think splitting champs w/o some sort of a true final is a HUGE mistake. Sure, there will always be IRI, but IRI isn't meant to be such and making it such (even defacto) would make it something other than IRI.

Some other issues I see (which have been mentioned before):

-southeastern teams and the west coast get the wrong end of the stick, travel is a lose-lose for them. No improvement, but given the relative size of such, one can't claim "improved travel" and still have a straight face without an asterisk.

-Due to a potential competitive level difference between locked regions, one would in time become a step-sibling to the other. This would be bad news for a lot of teams, as it would turn into what NASCAR has with the sprint cup (the elites, mostly) and the Xfinity series (less than elites with a bunch of elites who "steal" wins half the time). While this comparisons seems a bit odd, hear me out; The drivers who "steal" the Xfinity wins would be the elite teams forced into the lesser championship, where they would presumably win a disproportionate amount of the time, leading to such sentiment. The difference being that NASCAR knows well that one is the elite league and one is the lackey league, and that said drivers actively choose to race in the lower league (in addition to Sprint).

---------

Since I want this post to be ultimately constructive, Here's my personal advice for what to do (idealy in some ways):

-Recognize that in order to be a sport in the sense that other HS sports are seen and understood, there has to be a true championship attitude at all events (in that there will be true winners), and structure events to reflect that. Even if there is NO world championship (highest level is region), at least recognize those who excel (and not just say "you'all win, come back next time")

-Move as many areas as possible to districts, with district championships

-(sorta unrelated) make invitation to championship merit based, not quota or waitlist based. Even the current notion of "you have 1/60 of all teams so you shall send 10 teams out of 600 attending" feels and from what I've personally seen in IN, is another place where the flawed logic of "everybody wins" in that invitation to championship is treated as given not earned. (I still think wild cards, HOF, past champions and legacies should get in, they did earn it as none are cakewalks to perform).

-If championship needs to be capped at 400 or 600, so be it. Make the lower events (DSC's) better and greater in quantity, and make championship something that is worth working for and earning.

Finally, I'll give an example that could have merit to follow: Toastmasters International (My dad is very involved with them). They have a large number of clubs (analogous to teams in FRC), and use a tiered system in the following taxonomy (used for the international speech contest each year) : area, division, district, region (former, retired), and world conference. Present FRC districts are about the size (kinda smaller actually) of districts in TI... they used to have a region level that would say be 1/2 or 1/3 of the US (going off memory) which was since rolled up into an expanded world conference. In this case, since most attending are individuals, not whole clubs, the roll up made sense... but before, the region level did work and was sustainable.

On a side not, they also have redistricted clubs where they use a different system to compete (taped speeches) due to the long distances between said clubs (they're typically in remote locations).

Another similarity: they're about improving peoples leadership and public speaking skills, not just winning contests. However, clubs generally do give out awards each meeting for best speaker and best table topics (impromptu speaking), of which about 3 members will perform each meeting. This competitive yet supportive atmosphere is in many ways similar to what FIRST is like to me.

The point here is that there are systems that do work, and allow for a competitive yet supportive organization, and do not require axing one to gain the other.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Oh man, I haven't actually posted in a long time. Also wow, did I really just manage to put off an entire night's-worth of work to read all of this thread? :eek:

Okay, so let me begin by saying the following:
1) I'm not a big fan of the new Championship format for reasons that have have already been mentioned in this thread.
2) FIRST HQ could probably handled this better, particularly in the department of asking for community input prior to (presumably) signing contracts.
3) The data do not lend themselves to the assertion that this move will significantly decrease travel expenses for the overwhelming majority of Championship-attending teams.

But for the love of all that is beautifully powder coated and covered by anti-gravity circles, this is not the start of the apocalypse; we all know that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, not 2017:
4) We don't know all of the information, that fact is both explicitly and implicitly stated by FIRST. The unknown information could be bad (e.g. all teams will now be required to build bumpers in not two, but three different colors ::safety:: ), or it could be fantastic (e.g. all teams will now receive corndogs in their KoPs).
5) Please stop with the "FIRST is clearly doing this for the money just to line their own pockets [paraphrased]." Seriously? That is above and beyond pure, unsubstantiated speculation and does nothing but unnecessarily inflame the situation.
6) This change is not equivalent to everyone getting participation trophies. Heck, the number of awards (save the big ones) given out at Championship increased by a factor of four last year and the general consensus seemed fairly positive. But now an increase of a factor of two, two years down the road is the end of the "C" in FRC. (I freely admit that there is a bigger issue with the doubling of awards like CA, WFA, etc., see (1)).
7) We should all recognize here on CD that this change doesn't really directly affect the majority of FRC teams. A giant percentage of teams only sporadically (if ever) attend Championships, so no, they're not going to be disappointed that they're not going to see their friends from the other side of the country and they're also not going to be wringing their hands over exactly who will be crowned THE World Champion. I'm not saying this to minimize people's reservations, I myself am flying to STL to be with my team and to see old friends from around the world. I'm putting it out there so that we keep in mind that most FRCers (as hard to believe as it is) actually aren't reading this thread right now.
8) I am willing to give FIRST HQ the benefit of the doubt here. They didn't make this decision in a vacuum (even if they didn't directly ask for input). You may have noticed that many people in this thread have spoken about how transformational the Championship experience was for them. In fact, many are so passionate about it that they're up at 01:30 writing a post instead of sleeping. But note that they talk about GOING to championship and SEEING and TALKING to the Poofs*, not watching a webcast of Einstein with bated breath or just HEARING about the Poofs' autonomous skillzzzz. So maybe, just maybe, when Don Bossi says "... we want to give more and more kids that 'Championship Experience' that we know is so transformative in their lives..." we actually agree with him :ahh:; even if not in the specifics.

I know this is getting super long, so I'll end it with a brief anecdote: In between trying to keep up with this thread I got an email from a newly-minted MARS alum who, in the greatest tradition of procrastination, decided to write down some of her MARS memories for a project that we call 'Marvin's Journal.' And it struck me that for every memory like this:

"I remember when we won our first team award at worlds, and screamed “WE ARE MARS” from the nosebleed section. - 2013 St. Louis World Championship"

There were two like this:

"I remember when it felt like I was changing either Marvin V’s drive belts or polycord belts every match. - 2012 Da Whole Season"

"I remember when we lost with MORT, and then became best friends. - 2011 Palmetto Regional"

And it reaffirmed my sincere belief that as long as this is how the students experience and remember FIRST, we'll be okay. We may we wish and work to make things better (as we should), and we may even gripe. But at the end of the day I'm still going spend Thursdays crawling under robots with a flashlight and an inspection checklist, and I'm still going hurt my hands clapping for that rookie team who's robot was a true GP-community-effort, and I'm definitely still going to bawl my eyes out when MARS wins Chairman's - and that's what really matters.


-Luke Scime


*Specific shout-out only because you guys are awesome and have been featured so prominently in this thread.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

I have read this entire thread.
My personal takeaways are...
I have to attend the last world championship in 2016.
IRI in 2017 and onward is going to be even more prestigious as it truly becomes where champions are crowned.
I am not worried about the double championship, or the potential additional championships in the future. More teams attending these massive championships simply means more people will be inspired.
I am happy that FIRST is continuing to grow. :)

Re: Future First Championship News
 

(Once again these are my opinions, not Team 1806's or its sponsors)
Either school of thinking is counterproductive when taken to extremes. Championship needs to be diluted enough to be reasonably inclusive, yet competitive enough to be credible and provide an on field product that keeps sponsors, VIPs, and eventually the general public entertained. There also needs to be outreach and rookie teams there for various inspirational purposes.
FIRST HQ has the tough job of attempting to find the right balance to advance STEM. Problems arise and mistakes get made, even with good intentions. While there are good reasons to go to this format, there are uncertainties and issues with it that make me question if the change is worth the risk of alienating people and degrading the championship experience. FIRST really needs to respond to the concerns of the community to at the very least inspire confidence that there is a bigger, better plan waiting to be enacted.
A lot of the community here(myself included) has been motivated by trying to use the pursuit of robotic perfection as a way to advance their students' abilities as future STEM workforce members and humans in general. By lowering the ceiling of success, a bunch of students and mentors find it much harder to justify sugh a high time commitment involved in trying to build their team into Co-sort-of-World-Champion-of-<City>. Yes, it's still about the students, the sustainability of the team, and the values of FIRST, but when you take away the ability and some of the (admittedly slightly egotistical) incentive to Aim HighTM, the enthusiasm levels and ambition will falter.
Judging from this thread and awesome interactions with the FIRST community in the past, we're not short on passion and by extension enthusiasm. I'd rather not see FIRST make decisions that endanger these qualities.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

That explains this years game. With a new championships, there's a lot of totes and not a lot of volunteers.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

None of this makes any sense to me. None of it.

Cost: Spreading out any event/convention/championship does not reduce the amount of money needed to conduct it. Even if FIRST doubles the amount of teams involved (FLL, FTC, FRC) - you still need double the amount of the Volunteer Army needed to make this happen. Yes, I know that volunteers are unpaid, but there is still the issue of housing and transportation...

This is a very simplistic analogy - but most FRCers know most effective and cost-effective way to win a game of Risk: take Australia. Why? Because it is a bottleneck. The quickest way to lose Risk? Try and hold Asia. Now, this analogy is better served if we compared Australia to South America. Same amount of resources, double the expense. With one Championship, FRC had a bottleneck.

Number of teams: Here in is the real problem. Many teams struggle to get to a place where they can afford to make it to two Regionals ($9000). Now we are looking at doubling the amount of teams that can make it to a Championship event? That means that twice as many teams are going to be looking to their sponsors or their students to fund another event hundreds or thousands of miles away! We all see the threads on this forum about teams struggling to make it to Championships now - can you imagine if 800-1200 teams are qualifying for these events?

Watered down: Yes, the Championships this season seems watered down by allowing another 200 teams to qualify/waitlist. I will state this, my team made it in 2013 by winning our regional and being our region's RAS. Either way that we made it, the experience was profound on the development of our team. I think by keeping Champs open to the 6 awards offered up in each regional was sufficient.

in 2014 we did not qualify.

We came back this season with the best robot that we ever built. It was beautiful. The practice robot did everything we wanted it to do. The drive team practiced for 20 hours each week. Yet, come competition, our Comp Robot failed to connect properly with the field. We couldn't move properly until round 9 - and even then they only stacked two totes and placed a Container on top. This was a failure for FRC 4607. We knew that we had no shot at Champs, and this was fine with us. We just wanted to showcase what our robot could do... and we never were able to fulfill this. To my kids credit - they want to build a better drive train and figure out how we prevent this from happening next season. (I will be honest - I have been in a near-catatonic state ever since...) What I will state is this - our robots work great now, so look out those of you that compete at MRI and Minne-Mini.

Other Outlets: FRC would be wise to promote other outlets such as IRI, and the Minnesota State Tourney. Case in point - last season we missed out as we lost in North Star's Semis. It sucked. The kids were pissed about the ruling. But you know what happened? They came back into my shop and had a fire in their belly - they wanted to showcase the robot in the Minnesota State Tourney. They did just that finishing just behind team 2175 - the Fighting Calculators. Our alliance put up a great fight and we walked away with Runners-up at the MSHSL tourney. That Banner now hangs next to our 2013 State Champs Banner and the 2005 Girls Basketball Champions Banner in our gym.

FRC 4607 went from 8 kids interested in robotics in 2012 to over 50 kids this season. However, we did not make it last year or this year. Yet, next season we already have 40 kids grades 9-12 signed back on - and we had 12 seniors!

What FIRST needs to realize is that they need to practice what they preach. This is a competition - we want the champions. We want to know what we are up against.

And as I always tell my kids: Failure is always an option. It is what you do after you fail that defines your character.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Its been a while since I've posted on CD and i havent been directly involved with a team since 2011, but for what its worth:

I can't speak for "higher level" teams who's goal is to win a world championship. I see how you're disappointed in the split. I'm not saying you're wrong for wanting to win big and be the definitive winner. But, I'd like to remind everyone that FIRST IS growing. Would you rather have one, proportional championship event, with no wait list and potentially nearly 1000 teams attending one event in several years? Or would you rather have more, equally competitive teams spread between two events? Or force teams to travel three weekends in a row at the end of a season to attend a district championship, then a super regional, then the world championship? Even two weekends for a super regional+worlds would be bad

Remember that these venue contracts have to be signed a few years in advance, and while the propositon may seem unreasonable now, it may work a lot better in 3 years when there are more, more competitive robots, from fantastic teams. You cant wait until growth happens, and then change the model that year, or even the year after. From my perspective, FIRST is just planning ahead.

Would you be more disappointed if you were a crucial component of a winning alliance and had a high performance robot, but could not attend CMP because only first round picks were invited to attend to keep the number of teams attending down, but you were the second round pick of the #8 alliance?

When I was in high school, my team's sole goal was to make it to eliminations of any event (regional or district). Our robot wasn't great. Heck, a couple of years we just wanted a working robot. Even with our bar set low, we were still inspired. It didn't matter to me who was crowned the best, all I see through my poor-performance-goggle is "those teams are awesome", not "omg 469 won CMP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". 1189 is currently very much in the running for one of MI's bids to CMP. The team has not attended a Championship Event since 2005. We have had two full four-year generations go by without attending CMP. Last year, the team was one of the top teams in the state and had the opportunity to go, but couldn't for financial reasons, since they had not planned for success. They no doubt deserved to go. Its obviously a slightly different view being based out of metro Detroit, but I think 1189 can relate highly to the east coast and Midwest teams (which is quite a lot of teams) who now have a closer CMP to attend with a smaller travel budget. They would be thrilled to just be able to attend. I imagine this viewpoint is probably very different than that of a team who performs well every year and qualifies for CMP every year.

Even if FIRST had split east-west, nobody would win besides those within a 10hr drive time radius. Those in the midwest would still be faced with large travel times, just as how the west coast and other areas are still faced with high travel times for the new model. There is no perfect solution to make travel reasonable for everyone, and I fully support FIRST in their choices of cities. With the current competition model, Michigan has a huge number of teams and is sending a lot to CMP, and Texas has also seen significant growth in the past few years. A LOT of teams come from the east. If we're basically splitting east-midwest+everywhere else, I don't know how someone could argue that Detroit is better than STL diatance-wise when considering convenience for the majority of teams attending, assuming that teams will be able to pick their preferred event (and we don't know that yet). Fact: there is a higher density of teams along the east coast and in MI.

Think about the big picture. Perspective is everything.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

To me, this is sad is a lot of change, however I can't rationalize at all this decision. But, to be blunt this decision was made over a long period of time and work. As someone who books large events, you don't sign contracts five years out in multiple cities without serious time and energy put into it.

All of our complaining isn't going to change a thing unfortunately. Even if FIRST decided to 'listen to the people' they would have same major PR Issues enormous cancellations fees.

Maybe in 2021 we can re-visit... :(

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Coincidental timing that I just made this post in another thread this week, that attending a World (or Half/Quarter/N-th Part) Championship will not be a realistic goal for teams forever with the growth of the program.

Who is the National Champion for high school football? Basketball? Baseball has the Little League World Series but that is not high school teams. Eventually when your program hits a breaking point of too many teams it becomes untenable to have enough intermediate tournaments to filter down to a final champion with any credibility. Cost and time eventually become too much to attend that many events for a lot of teams, and there is also a luck factor of coming from a more difficult region. I'm not familiar with FLL at a high level but I imagine they are at that point as they can only invite 1 team per Championship tournament for each region to the World Festival based on their numbers in the marketing material. I get the argument for "one true champion" but eventually that will become an impossibility if FIRST gets an FRC team in every high school.

That said, I preferred where FRC was going with the District and Super Regional model, and think they are jumping the gun on giving up on a single World Championship (we've probably got close to 10 years before we really need to think about that). This could be a stepping stone to Super Regionals (the two events do work out for North/South SR as others have pointed out) but if that is the goal I think FIRST would be better off keeping St. Louis as is through 2017, then starting with Houston and Detroit as the Regional Championships in 2018 with a FIRST World Championship still happening. Two more years of growth is probably enough for each Regional Championship to be a 300-400 team event, and then the World Championship can be held with a smaller number of teams (200). Additional Regional Championships would be added as needed with the World Championship staying at a capped size. With this model you get the benefit of keeping the Super events capped at a size that can be more reasonably hosted in a typical sports arena/convention center combo, which is important as the 600 team event being attempted this year severely restricts your location options. I think 200-300 teams is the ideal to shoot for and whenever you push up against the 300 team limit you add another Regional Championship and reduce the At-Large bids from each that make it to the World Championship.

In the end whatever happens won't make a huge difference to me as the teams I've been with haven't attended Champs in close to a decade now. I understand the outcry from those who can count on going almost every year (the majority of ChiefDelphi's user base), but for teams that rarely qualify (the majority of FRC teams) I don't think this will change much. I just wish that the geographic repositioning would have brought things a little closer to each coast, to me the new events are still very much in the center of the country.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

I can agree with most of this - but if we allow FRC to get to a point where State Championships are enough, do we lose the community of FIRST? I will be the first to state that Minnesota's state championship lent credence to our team's success within my own school district.

However, the goal of FIRST is bigger than that - that is the magic of this program. The moment we all let go and allow regional championships be the end all, be all - we may lose everything else that makes FRC great.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

It is possible to justify moving to a two-venue championship (eg a stop-gap to deal with intermediary scalability problems). The two big problems from this announcement are:

1) How FIRST sees its programs (presumably including FRC):

2) How FIRST is willing to make and commit to big decisions without testing the waters/asking for opinions from the community beforehand

Both those are "problems" not because they are inherently wrong or broken, but they form a "big picture vision" of the future of this program that at least a significant subset of the community passionately disagree with. With those priorities, this may only be the beginning of a series of decisions with similar goals and reaction.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Drawing from my own experience of going to champs for the first time last year, the drop in competitiveness is what scares me most. As was said earlier, this kind of change could very well reduce championships to a glorified convention. My team earning a spot to champs after our first regional win in 11 years was huge to us, and the most valuable part of it to me by far was the pride in seeing how we really could hold our own amongst the best teams in the world. Knowing that we earned our place defined my experience there and my desire to earn our way to champs again.

Inflating champs to such a huge size will mean qualifications will no longer be that world class level of competition; it will be downright saturated with underperforming teams. 600 really feels like pushing it to me, but 800+ is very obviously too far; there simply aren't enough competitive teams to fill even half that quota, and the minority of downright admirable teams will become drastically scattered across the events/ fields. I can’t imagine how disappointing it would be for new students go to the world “championships”, and witness that 20%+ of the robots in their division barely (or don’t) work, and less than five robots are really worth following; that just sounds like a weaker regional.

I’m particularly irked coming from NC, because it’d be nearly impossible for my team in future years to see real world class competition anywhere other than a competitive championship (IRI will never ever be in the budget, and NC is turning into its own district next year). Plus, transportation to champs would still be nasty.

Besides the actual competing aspect, there will be a lot less for teams to learn from at champs. For example, my team is using this year at champs as a building opportunity to focus on learning from others how to improve our infrastructure/ sustainability. If champs were split in two, such an effort would be much less fruitful, because half the teams who know best about that stuff (mainly powerhouse teams) would simply not be there.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

When I saw this announcement yesterday I was more disappointed with the locations than the splitting of the regional. As others have said, adding Houston doesn't do anything for travel for us. Detroit will cut travel time in half if we decide (and can afford) to go there.

I understand the disappointment many people feel with the split. I think they probably should have started this in 2016 instead of 2017 for one reason - the sooner they start, the sooner students who have experienced the single championship model "age out" of the competition. In 4 years, there will be no students who know the "single championship" model and "dual championships" will be the new normal.

I think dual championships might drive some different team dynamics and attitudes as well. If this change eliminates the goal of "world champion" and "win at any cost", I can envision how that might change the goal of gracious professionalism for the better.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Food for thought:

In 2008 (I picked an arbitrary year), 340 teams attended champs, out of 1499 who competed. That means the percentage of teams who attended the event was 22.6% of all teams. So almost a quarter of teams who competed in 2008 attended the event.

3 years later, in 2011, this had decreased, to 17.1%. 351 teams attended champs, while 2053 teams competed. In a 3 year span, FRC saw a near-600 team growth, but only 19 slots opened at championship. This trend continued further, into last year: 2014.

In 2014, 397 teams attended the championship event, while a whopping 2696 competed overall. That translated to 14.7% of competing teams qualifying for champs.

The point I'm driving at is, a smaller and smaller chunk of teams get to experience championships every year. People keep driving at, championships are going to be less inspiring because all the best teams aren't going to be at a single one. But what's more inspiring; seeing a "watered down" championships, or not seeing champs at all? For me, at least, as a former student turned mentor, champs was about the energy. The passion. The electricity. I don't remember a single match from when I was student at champs. But I remember being with my team, I remember running around the stadium. I remember seeing signs and decorations, hearing guest speakers celebrate us and what we do. It was the time of my life. Just being there set me down the road to where I am now. A mentor, a volunteer. A guide to these students. Words can't express how proud I am of that.

That brings us to 2015. Almost 3000 teams are competing this year, 2892. We've already been told that we will be hosting 600 teams at this event. 600/2892 = 20.7%. The highest percent we've had attending since 2008. Which is a great step forward. After an 8% decline over 7 years, we gain 6% back in one year. But what are we sacrificing to accomplish this? We are literally packing two championship events into one arena. 8 Division, two Einsteins. I'm not a logistics person, but that seems like a lot for a single venue to hold. FIRST is growing, and with that, it is becoming harder and harder to provide as many students as possible with an experience like mine. We're already packing 2 champs into one building, so doesn't the next logical step seem to be expanding?

Consider this: In 2017, we'll say 800 teams attend champs, 400 per event. let's ballpark the team count that year at 3500. Just an estimate. 800/3500 = 22.8%. Boom. We're back to where we were 7 years ago. FIRST will have more than doubled in size but we are still providing the same percentage of teams with the championship experience. Diluted? Yes. But to students who have never gone before, inspiring all the same.

I am as hardened a competitor as anyone else. My students constantly tell me to take a chill pill. But I can't. Competition is in my blood and I love pushing and driving my team to improve and do better. Yes, I would love a centralized event where the elite teams can play-off. Maybe with some relaxed rules. Some corn dogs and goats. But hey, that can't be possible, right? Oh.

Competition is exciting for me. But if we start depriving kid's learning and experience in FIRST for the sake of competition, then what have we really become? Everyone asks me if what I do is like Battlebots. And I proudly tell them no. But if FIRST is all about competition, then isn't it the same? I'm in the program to help kids learn and grow as people; a lot of people are in that same boat. And if we are going to accomplish that goal, then we need to get kids exposed to an event with the passion and energy of a world championship.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

This thread is expanding much faster than I can read it. I don't mean to step on anyone's toes if I'm repeating ideas.

My thoughts as I've read through:
1) Having Super-regionals and then a Championship event adds at least one, probably two, and possibly even three weeks to the competition season (Having back to back competitions that you have to qualify for and can't plan for ahead of time is simply not feasible).
The length and intensity of competition season as it is now - at least in the district model- already stretches a lot of student's resources. With a super-regional model, we'd be running into graduation season for many people by the time champs rolls around. We'd also be looking at more mentor and volunteer burnout. Not to mention that smaller super-regionals won't be able to offer the full CMP experience, see my next point.

2) People seem to be mostly upset over a lowering of the level of competition and not being able to find out which is the best robot in the world. I'm obviously pretty alone in this sentiment, but to me, World Champs is a lot more about the gathering of the teams to learn from one another. I get a lot more out of volunteering, attending the conference talks, and perusing scholarship row than I do watching the Einstein matches. Obviously, the finals are ridiculously exciting, but for overall benefit, it's the rest of the week that I'm there for.

I know that a lot of people will argue at this point that it's the drive to be the best in the world that inspires them, but... I really don't think that that ultra-competitiveness is in the spirit of FIRST.
Mostly I want to yell at people to put the rulers away, that finding out who has the biggest --, ahem, the best robot is not the overall goal of this program. (In case you haven't heard, it's Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). From the tone of the announcement, I think I'm on the same page as FIRST here.

3) The stated reasons for this change is
I know the travel costs thing is dubious at best. Having North/South events is dumb when compared to East/West, when considering the distribution of teams. But, as numerous people have pointed out, if FIRST is releasing locations and dates, they're already pretty set in stone. Can't do anything about that.
But the other point? I think that's valid. It's no denying that FIRST is expanding, and there are a lot more kids and teams that should benefit from the CMP experience than are able to currently go. The system as it is is already pushing the accommodation resources of a major city to the breaking point. You can't get any more teams to CMPs without splitting it up.

tl;dr:
*The 'solution' of adding super-regionals will extend the season, ultimately leading to student, mentor, and volunteer burnout.
*Champs is about a lot more than who has the best robot
*FIRST is expanding and Champs needs to as well.

Finally, to get to the constructive bit, here's my suggestions:
1) Get as many teams as possible into the district model before 2017.
2) If you absolutely must know who has the best robot, have a smaller event during the summer. Or, you know, there's always IRI.
3) As an alternative to everyone just dealing with the horror of multiple world champions, split the two events into FLL/FTC and FRC.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

In 2017 first is turning world champs into regional champs. So why can't teams get that same inspiration at a District champs model?

Re: Future First Championship News
 

The people talking about having a super-regional always seem to assume that teams would continue to sign up for two regional competitions before the super-regional. I'm wondering how many teams that actually qualify for and go to the Championship event through winning an event just participated in one regional.

Seems to me that the powerhouse teams sign up for 2, maybe 3 regional competitions to increase their odds for an invitation. What if to qualify for a super regional, you just need to make it to the semi-finals or win an engineering award at one regional? Then teams would still compete in their same 2 events per year prior to a championship.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

It was hard to try to express the complexity of my take, and yes - I am concerned by this attitude (of my own) as well...but isn't there a part of all of us that feels this way? I'm certainly not advocating doing away with all of the "non-winning" championship invitations...but it is the group of "winners" that makes the event prestigious for a Rookie All Star, or another possibly less competitive team to be there. When 400 teams became a problematic size for championship, perhaps it was time to start being a bit more selective...not less.

After reading all of these posts - and there's tons of wisdom here - I've concluded that a much better solution would be to make districts universal (with notable exceptions of course), use the district championship as the premier event to share with more teams, and keep a single championship of around 400 teams - shared with FLL and FTC...because seeing what they do, and letting them see what we do is part of the magic.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

These are just my own initial thoughts. Not of my team and or members. More things to consider for you.

I'm going to pull some information from FLL, and some people are going to hate on it because to some degree FLL and FRC aren't comparable, but hang with me. It's to get perspective.

I see people talking about percentages of teams that qualify for worlds, 14-20% of all the FRC teams in first qualify for champs. For FLL, ~85 Teams qualify for world championships. There are over 25,000 FLL teams. That means a whopping 0.0034% of FLL teams qualify for the World championships...

But. That's not even the best part of it. Not every region receives a qualifying spot. Regions are given spots based on a random lottery system. So you could be the best team in the whole world, and not qualify.

Oh wait, there is more... You can only attend one regional in your allotted area. That regional is only one day long where you get maybe 2 practice matches, and 3 matches that actually count. 3 matches. One day. If you have a bad day, sucks.

But wait! FLL is cheaper, we aren't paying thousands of dollars to participate. FRC is complex, serious, and sophisticated. We aren't playing with toys.

If you fall into this category go watch this, this, this. and this

It's hard to understand the amount of time that these teams put into their robots to package and have them preform as well as they do. I would even argue per individual basis, it is harder to be on a world champion FLL team than a world champion FRC team. Between all the time spent fundraising for the "thousands of dollars spend on competitions our" and all nighters on our robots, FLL kids put at least the same amount of time a typical team captain of an FRC team would put in, if not more. (at high levels of play)

So what? What's the point in all of this?

FLL kids are still incredibly inspired, and incredibly inspiring. And they have way worse odd than FRC teams. These kids are not ignorant, and really do care about their projects. They are doing phenomenally well with frankly, a terrible qualifying system. FRC teams can't complain with a 14% qualification rate compared to a 0-0.0034% qualification rate. Imagine going into a competition knowing that no matter how well you do, before you even start you have no chance at qualifying.

You don't need to go to championships to be inspired.

FIRST is solving a non-existent problem of teams qualifying to champs. Inspiration will occur and lives will be changed regardless.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So then. What is the solution?

Instead of degrading the quality of FIRST Championships, increase the quality of district championships.

Don't make champs meh to the top tier teams that are doing a huge part of the volunteering, mentoring, team starting, event planning, and FIRST message spreading for us all.

Make districts a bigger deal. MSC has TV coverage, that's awesome! Find a big venue! Emulate champs to a larger degree.

Oh, and as much as it is the "all the best robots coming to the same place to compete"

I think the real magic is the "the whole world coming to compete in one place"

If the whole world isn't there, it completely loses the magic for me. Having just the winners play together isn't enough. You can talk to people freely, half the people walking on the street are from a team and it's awesome! To be having half of the world cut off from that is... Well meh.

I would much rather see a smaller percentage of teams qualify to maintain the atmosphere and quality of the event. Simply put, splitting the championships sucks.


*** I come from a a back to back qualifying FLL team
*** During my participation with FIRST, I have been on a team that has qualified 6/9 years I have participated.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

I know of situations in FTC where this has happened. I don't remember (and want to call out) team names, but I remember some teams in 2013/2014 FTC that didn't qualify for super regionals in their area, so they paid their way to an event further away to compete and qualify for a different super-regional.

Right now the line of competitions for Michigan FTC is:
1 or 2 districts --> states --> super-regionals --> worlds.
Before super-regionals, only 1 team from states would move on to worlds; the Inspire winner. With the addition of super-regionals, my kids could compete with high-level high school teams, and learn from them. I have no doubt the same would be true for FRC.

I would like to see FRC (and FTC) lock teams into area events so they can't steal a spot from other teams by going to an outside event.

Right now, Michigan has the set up:
2 or 3 districts (only first 2 count towards states) --> states --> worlds.

As the program grows in every state, I would like to see:
2 or 3 districts --> states --> super-regionals --> worlds.

I believe this system works great for FTC, and my kids enjoyed super-regionals just as much as I have enjoyed worlds.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Thanks for the FLL perspective above.

Why isn't FTC expanding? This year, while FRC gets a 50% increase from 400 to 600, FTC has stayed the same with 128 teams out of 4000+ worldwide.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

As long as they end up doing some sort of North vs South match with the champions from each, with the winner being officially recognized, I'd be happy. That kind of change isn't hard to tack on to what we've heard so far.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

After sleeping on it last night I think I get it. Most of us believe that we strive to get to a world championship that corresponds with a FIRST convention. I think FIRST feels that they offer a convention (workshops, vendors, great learning experiences) that also offers a competition as a side show. Not saying that I agree with their analogy but understand their reasonings. They use the venue for team and student growth. They want as many as possible to experience the great learning experience. My deep feelings (if I express them again) would only add more redundancy to an extremely long thread.

My students and team always set lofty goals. They attempt the near impossible every year. It's part of the magic of FIRST. They take one step at a time to towards greatness. Watering down their expectations and possible achievements is unacceptable in my world. Giving free passes to teams to a world championship has always been a sore spot for me. I always hoped it would get better, now it appears to have gotten worst. I'm sure the brain trust at FIRST has great intentions and a long range plan to excel. Their procedures are puzzling to me but I will remain diligent and faithful to the cause. My goals have always been student focused and I believe FIRST has those same goals.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

I'm trying to remember, it seems to me that we have experienced a North vs South division before in this country. Fortunately, there's no longer any residual animosity...

Re: Future First Championship News
 

FRC doesn't come anywhere near a monopoly on technical difficulty (talk to Falcons about underwater robots...or, you know, watch the movie) or competitive experience (ever been to VEX?)

The reason I stick around as an FRC volunteer? I trust the program. Things like this...it's not even so much about the content, it's about the process. If you've been around long enough, you may remember the open letter for transparency for several years back signed by many if not most of the top players of the FRC community. People (and quite frankly, businesses), that put untold effort into the success of the program worldwide. You may remember the mass exodus to VEX when FIRST dropped IFI (FVC became FTC). This announcement, particularly as a gushing press release without addressing or even attempting to anticipate actual objections. This feels very much like IFI all over again.

Bumping this because I hadn't even noticed this. Can people from the cities speak to these convention centers? Going back to 400 teams, is this going to be real "fields in the pits" feel again?

(emphasis mine) I agree with most of this, but the phrase "FIRST is pretty good at gauging what's good for the community without it's input" seems off. Particularly with the example of Districts, which is the exact opposite of FIRST working for community good without input. (Districts were a grassroots initiative in Michigan that FiM pushed to HQ. MAR picked it up, again grassroots, making MAR and pitching to HQ.)

TechFire, you're already in Districts. District Champs equals a Super Regional in the model discussed on this thread: it doesn't extend our (MAR's) season at all.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

i heard rumors that Minute Maid Field is for the Fantasy FIRST Finalists.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

You see what giving a preliminary plan for handling the expansion of the program gets them? This thread. If they had announced way earlier that this was the first step in making FIRST able to handle so many teams prior they would have had backlash, and yet the more you think about it the more you realize something like this was probably necessary eventually. The adding of more and more tiers to the FRC event structure is not infinitely sustainable and something else has to be done. It's just that they went for the harder sell first.

If you really think the excitement of a regional or championships is actually diminished by this than you really do care more about being the sole victor over literally everything else. Why? because the rest is still there! I think they knew exactly how we would feel initially and personally I think that the idea that this is bad is wrong. And besides being the best 3 of 3000 isn't all that bad compared to best 6 of 3,600 or 4,000 anyway.

And if you trust VEX just as much than why have you not saved the money and gone all in there? It's because the FRC challenge and community has it's own value that has been worth it along side vex, underwater, ftc, whatever. I'm arguing that A. this does not diminish any of that value and B. I'd rather the do expanded districts first before split championships but if they think this is a better first step than I can support that.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Nope it isn't. It's only "necessary" if you want to keep this 20% average of teams making it to champs, which as we have seen with FLL isn't necessary for the program to be incredibly successful.

This just kills the atmosphere of the event.

Mediocrity isn't really okay...

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Okay well excuse me for getting a wait list spot and diluting the competition with my crappy lite robot you selfish...

Any way, back to facts. #1 it won't be "20 percent" of teams as time goes on and there are more total teams competing. #2 FIRST has found a way to hold a 600 slot championship and I think it's fine for them to invite extra teams so they can make sure they know how to handle that many in the future as more qualifying events spring up. #3 having a larger field means a bigger event. I think the size and participation that newcomers see when they first visit a championship or regional is part of the sell.

Re: Future First Championship News
 

+10

Re: Future First Championship News
 

Its not about you or your team and the numerous wait-list spots with the 50% expanded field of 2015 (FIRST created that with 20% or 600 going this year) ... its about sensible growth and geographical "fairness" that reflects the world and FIRST'S mission statement. Common sense is needed.

North/South was settled 150 years ago. FIRST has an obligation as a non-profit to make sensible moves that benefit its customers, not just grab more entry fees, bolster Andy Mark and hotel chains in two cities , with outrageous package pricing and weaken the competition level into two semi-events with no chance to see the best teams in one arena starting in 2017.

Thats in essence the root of the questioning going on here.. it does not add up to any good future move for newer teams like us nor long-standing established teams... it shakes the foundation of FIRST equally. Hence this thread. Hope someone decides to do a change that what was presented a day ago.