whoo! nothing beats hacky sack!

/me joins jim

by far, the best time i had playing with a hacky sack was in JFK at 7 in the morning. i wonder how many people the team pissed off... ;)

HACKY SACK,

/me joins in, doesnt hack the sack. Gets kicked out :(

/me joins the circle and hacks up a storm :)

after i was done thinking about that i thought about how much money/time i poured into first this year. for double the price of a regular ticket to disney world (that's a full day ticket mind you) we got three boring/pointless hours with people with flashing lights telling me where i could and could not go. not cool. the party at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was nice. food could have been better, but the activities were cool. sure somebody got hurt, but the rest of the party was fun.

we put lots of money into FIRST before the party. when they charge $75 for the party afterwords, it better be a freaking good party. i'd never pay a cover charge of $75 dollars anyways, and i especially won't now because i was bored out of my mind.

When the parties bore you, good ole fun with friends in the hotel room never gets old.

O god, thats scary

I am not getting into a debate about the event fee again. It was financially responsible, and helps keep FIRST fiscally solvent.

There are many other threads that deal with how the event fee was structured, how it worked, etc.

The Team Party, at Epcot, after the Closing Ceremonies was not $75. Ever. At all. It was $30 per person. This is what FIRST charged additional participants, parents, and sponsors who wanted to attend.

So, then, to return to your statement.

A single day admission ticket to one of Walt Disney World's four major theme parks, including tax, is $50.88.

Times two? $101.76. So, your $75 figure isn't exactly double the price of a regular ticket.

Next.

You paid $30 for the party, not $75.

Next.

You were given free food (and there's lots of it), free entertainment, exclusive access to an entire section of a theme park, and after-hours admission.

For a moment, consider the lost revenue Disney incurs just by closing Future World an hour earlier? No dinner sales (outside of the Coral Reef restaurant, anyway), and no merchandise sales. Add into that the wages paid to the crowd control cast members.

Come up with a general number for the price of the food you consume, while you're at it.

I still think $30, whether you pay it at the gate, through the event fee, or through a WDW-FIRST package, is a steal.

Not for anything, I worked for two days just to help assemble the Long Island regional last season, and I wouldn't expect anyone to take my work for granted. I am proud of what I did, and would do it again in a heartbeat, but to read the comments of a bunch of people who're completely detached from everything that's going on behind the scenes is, honestly, disgusting.

Collin, do you care to refute my argument?

I like the box idea, it would be really cool if we had like a contest for the best drum beats using only items you FIND at the competition :D

That is more than slightly disturbing.

Heh... I remember the flight to Orlando, for Nationals, last season (2002). Three teenagers, two with bleeched hair, one with bright blue hair (me), playing hacky sack around noon on the curb area of the Kansas City, MO, airport. Needless to say (which is why I'm typing it), we got more than our share of dirty looks from the locals.

Ohm my... that was fun...

man no one danced at our party there was music and those air machinces you can jump in and races with tricicles and floor hockey and volleyball and basketball but no dancing or stage. yet people on my team dont like to party some didn't go and those who did go only wanted to talk about first.
i thought the party was suposed to distract you from all the hectic stuff about first.
hey chandler and i still had fun:)
but we had to be back to the hotel by 11:00 :(
Motorola region was awsome

i love to hacky sack around, although i am not a pro, iam large, but can still move like a bat outa hell!!!

yea our team arrived at all-star sports at 1:30 in he morning 2 days before the comp. well it took antoher hour to get our rooms in order so we started a hack game in the dark, wow!!, its really hard!!

Badjokeguy

it sounds (and looks) to me like you are

yah, we had to recruit parents to go buy tickets. the fee was $75 for those on a team...$30 not on team, so we had five parents go max out credit cards to buy tickets for us and a few other teams.

we didn't get two theme parks we got one and it sucked...i wound up sitting on a bench (actually, i sat on one bench and was forced to move because that bench wasn't cleared for FIRST participants) and looked over strategies for the matches we lost to figure out what went wrong.

previously addressed (i know because i helped recruit parents and had to swear that they'd be reimbursed)

it sucked and there was no where to sit and i was tired
no there wasn't it's been established earlier in the thread that mandy moore is hardly entertainment the part that sucked and nothing was open that i paid enough for it should have been a full day of admission
i did, then i considered how much money i poured into food during nats. i'm not sure if anybody else noticed this, but when you ordered the value meal from the stand, they charged 50 cents more than if you ordered everything separate...hmmmmm.

previously addressed

not 30, 75 i worked during the off-season to plan and host the IRI. i am not saying it is near regional status in what goes into it, but i know exactly what you mean about crap behind the scenes. a group of I]students[/i] did trophy's, projection, team layout, shirt design, company sponsors, built and transported three goals (our team captain drove around with 200 lbs of filanges in the back of his lumina for two months) and the list goes on. i know [exactly what you mean.i do and i did...however in the "spirit of FIRST" (the most overused expression ever) i am willing to recognise that we disagree on this and i can never change your mind, and in turn you cannot change mine. however, let's put it behind us and focus our attention on things we can change, because there's nothing either of us can do about last year's team party at nationals. bygones.:)

Colin:
Umm...no.
You are wrong. I have to much math to do now to write it all out for you. Maybe when I get home tomorrow after class I will find the time to spell it out for you.


Wetzel
~~~~~~~~~
E:\David Bowie\David Bowie - Changes.mp3

Well, then, humor me in the interest of debate. There's nothing as damaging as misinformation (Not to be confused with Miss Information, who seems friendly on all acounts).

Allow me to reference ]FIRST's Event Fee page, please.

If you read that, you'll see that participating students on teams that booked outside of a Walt Disney Co. subsidized package were assessed a per person, $75 fee. Parents and sponsors, it notes, were charged $30 for a wristband to enter the Wrap Party.

Only $30 from the larger $75, however, went toward the Team Party. The rest subsidized other costs. The vBulletin Search engine won't let me search for 'event fee' per se, but I've already broken down the cost of a subsidized package versus that of a unsubsidized package and event fee. They're virtually identical, though if I recall correctly, the subsidized packages saved something negilible, like $5 per student.

So, in the end, you payed $30 for the party. Similarly, another fraction of that went to defray the cost of providing bus transportation to all teams.

Forgive me for not elucidating my point better. You asserted that you paid twice the price of a normal entry ticket for sub-par everything. You were incorrect, if not because you paid less than the cost of a single-day admission ticket, then because $75 isn't twice $50.88.

Your opinion of Epcot, as it relates to this debate, is irrelevant.


Again, I can't force you to like what was provided. As I mentioned just a moment ago, though, your opinion of the services provided is not what I'm contending. Instead, I'm illustrating that your were charged a nominal fee for certain services.

In my opinion, that fee was beyond reasonable, considering the services provided. If you want to contend that services were provided, go ahead. If you don't like Mandy Moore, that's not my problem, nor FIRST's.

You always have the option to abstain from participating, and I suspect that you may exercise that right in the future.


You didn't mention whether you're dealing with the food vendors at the competition site, or within the parks themselves. I didn't eat at the competition site, but I'm fairly certain that the food is provided by an outside vendor. I can't speak for the prices.

In any case, I was specifically referring to the food you consumed during the team party; or, more appropriately, what an average person might consume. Even if nobody ate anything, the food still needs to be paid for.

I welcome disagreement. In fact, I probably thrive on it. But, unless you're going to support your diminishing comments with legitimate claims, suggestions, or examples, I would prefer that you keep them out of intelligent discussion.

If you continue to elucidate your points further with examples, you can whine all day and all night. I don't care. But, please, don't devalue the hard work of others because you think Mandy Moore sucks, or because you didn't have a good time.

You were charged a nominal fee, which more than payed for itself by setting foot into Epcot alone, and to criticize that without providing any examples whatsoever how to improve upon things is demoralizing and useless.

See, isn't debate fun? Gracious professionalism means that we respect differing ideas, opinions, and methods of being. It does not mean that we shut our mouths at the first sign of controversy.