Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

30% of higher; allow the regional winners (plus wildcards and hall of fame, etc.) to attend, and give priority on the waitlist to teams that have not gone in the greatest number of years. I believe having everybody go once every four years would be good.
Attending championships without competing would be a bitter fruit to swallow for me at least, especially given that I would have to miss one or two days of school.

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

And the percentage of those teams in those leagues that make the championship? FAR FAR less than that....

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

53.3333% (16/30) of NBA (and NHL) teams make the playoffs.

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

I don't think playoffs are even close to equivalent to a "championship" event. Playoffs are like district champs. I can see 30% of teams in a district going to DCMP.

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

Making the playoffs qualifies you to compete to become the single champion of your sports league.
Qualifying for Championships enters you into a competition to be part of a single champion alliance.
I don't feel it's a false equivalence. If making the playoffs is no big deal, ask a Mets fan.

If the World Series is the equivalent the Qualifying for championships, then that's 6%, or around 200 FIRST teams. Cut the size of Championships to 1/3. That's about the size of champs when I was a student. In 2001, 14 years ago.

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

Darn! You got me!

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

Who says it would have to cost $20k? Ridiculous comment.

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

20k is a low ball number. It costs:
5k$ for entry
6k$ for a coach bus for 4 days (flights cost the same for smaller / further teams)
5 k$ for ten hotel rooms
2k$ for 8 meals per person for 20 people

And I'm not including, lost wages / supply teacher coverage.

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

My sentiments exactly. This is much easier to implement if everybody is in districts. If a district wants to let every team go to the District Championship every 4 years, then let them do that. Let each district send the number of teams representative of their percentage of the total number of teams, etc.

Keep one championship. Cap the number of teams. Let the percentage take care of itself.

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

So I assume that you want FIRST to pay for teams' travel and hotel costs? In addition to the multitude of other expenses involved other than registration.

Because when your feet actually touch the ground again 20 thousand dollars isn't that much for a large group of people to attend championships, and I cringe at the amount much larger teams have to pay to make the same trip.

Regardless. I think the issue of money speaks for itself. Why worry about the amount of students exposed to championship when there are already many teams who have a hard time affording it even when they qualify now? If I were on a team that qualified this year and our budget was already wiped out from the first 6 weeks of competition I would be hard pressed to go to st Louis unless our robot was top notch. Now we're talking about adding even more teams that haven't earned a spot and got in on a waitlist. It's unthinkable.

I'm not trying to come off as a jerk, but somewhere down the line, we're going to have to face the facts, and start living in the real world. If your team has plenty of money to waste on a trip (yeah in one respect I mean waste) then go for it. Championships IS about inspiration after all not those silly robots.

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

Watching (NOT COMPETING) is free registration. The original comment was specifically stating watching. Knocks off $5K.

Also, 10 hotel rooms? For 20 people? I'd think that 6-7 would be more likely (unless the district had some really nasty rules about students/room, or there was some other oddball case involved)--usually you'd get about 4 students/room, but add in a couple of rooms for mentors (typically 1-2/room). Knocks off about another $1K.

So... 6K for the bus, 4K for the hotel, hard to argue the meals unless the people in question buy them themselves. So that's $10K-12K, not counting lost pay (which... I'm not entirely familiar with how that works for teachers, but don't teachers get vacation time, or is all of that in summer/breaks?).

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

There's a lot more to do at Championship than "watch." For starters, they're always looking for volunteers. Beyond that, there's seminars to attend, teams to talk with, suppliers that are giving out information, scholarship row, and the FIRST finale. I attended without a team last year and had a great time and actually got to spend far more time talking with and learning from other teams than I would have if I had a robot to worry about. And, of course, simply watching the matches in person is incredible.

Why would you need to pay a registration fee to attend the event if the team wasn't competing?
Why would you have to bring 20 people/your own coach bus/10 hotel rooms?

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

Okay, so who's going to pay 12k to go watch? Same argument. We have a hard time getting exempt absences when we are competing. Let alone just going to watch. They would never excuse our kids to go watch. Good luck getting many school boards to okay that. In Monongalia county, they just passed a policy limiting the number of days students can miss for a single activity. While we are not a school team (we are a community organization), we are sponsored by them and we are still governed by them somewhat loosely. We're going to have a hard time when we go into districts, let alone trying to get three days off of school to not even compete! That is 100% not going to happen.

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

I was going to bring that up. I don't think a lot of school districts are going to let kids cut school if they see no net benefit to them, unfortunately.

Yeah, it's gotten to the point for the 2016 season we'll have to schedule whatever district events have S/S dates and take the good and the bad with region champs being over the high school's spring break if we want to go to another regional/district and champs if we qualify.

Re: What percentage of FRC teams should attend championships?
 

Does your school district allow students to attend student leadership conferences? Allow teachers to attend professional development conferences? Sell the conferences as those (or better yet, hopefully FIRST can gain some accreditation for their conferences).

Alternatively, volunteer. A school would look bad discouraging volunteerism.