Re: Early or Late Regional?
 

When I was on 973, we generally avoided week one regionals because it's usually the roughest on FRC's side.
A good example is what happened with the minibot towers this year; It also can sometimes prepare your strategy for your first regional, since you will be able to watch the streams and scout out which strategies are optimal, and which don't really work.

Aside from that, we opted for the most competitive regional. This is assuming you have another event after your first regional though; we went big or went home, aiming to be the best we could for our second regional, and after that for Saint Louis.

Re: Early or Late Regional?
 

Add me to the week 2 camp.

In the seasons where we only competed in a week 5 regional and the championship (08, 09, 10) we usually were not very competitive at the regionals but we got our act together fixed issues and were good in our second event.

About 60-70% of the teams who we competed with at the week 5 event had already done 1 or more regionals giving them a big leg up on us.

Some teams like 78 have a good history of taking advantage of the week 1 proficiency and strategy gap of other teams and making it work in their favor. By winning the Granite state regional or being the finalist in it many years in a row. I believe 25 and 103 have had similar results in Jersey.

On the other side if you are good at making redesigns within the allowed witholding allowance you may be able to go late and still do well by watching regionals and learning what works well for other teams and adapting it to your robot.

I personally like going to an early event with a team that scouts well and can use strategy to it's advantage before everyone else publishes "How to play the game" here on CD and teams all play copycat.

Re: Early or Late Regional?
 

As a team to play only a single event, I prefer week 2.
It's only the second event for 7% of the teams and most of the bugs in the system have been exposed and addressed, so you don't have to suffer through growth pains.


For personal volunteering, I prefer week 1 because there are problems to ferret out and solve, and I really like the hustle and bustle of troubleshooting and fixing broken things.
Then a late week because it's more laid back after the answers have been worked out and it's just a matter of recognizing the symptoms and applying the correct fix.