Ultimately, I think the solution(s) to our current problems have been touched upon in this thread. Enlarging the amount of FRC teams that are able to attend the Championship event (and that is
not the same as making the event itself bigger) and restructuring the regional format as a whole.
But that's not going to stop me from talking.
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Originally Posted by Libby K
I don't have any suggestions for HOW to make it better because a lot of ideas have been covered already. I can only imagine how difficult these decisions must be for FIRST. However, I just want to echo this sentiment.
Especially the awards. The Chairman's Award is the reason we're here. If you take away the award about changing the culture, you lose what makes FIRST unique. FIRST wasn't started because we needed to whack a bunch of robots around. FIRST was created because America (at the time, we were USFIRST) was falling behind in STEM education and it needed a way to celebrate engineers as the rockstars of our generation.
This stuff seems to be beaten into us at every turn by FIRST and its media, but from this thread, it looks like nobody's listening.
If you remove qualification for the teams that are doing what we're really here for? You've lost the point. Those teams that are getting it right need to be celebrated on a Championship stage just as much as the ones who produce a winning robot.
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Not that I really disagree here, but I'm going to play devil's advocate.
You're right, it's not just about the robots. The Chairman's, EI, and RAS teams need to be celebrated. But why are we celebrating them on the field if their accomplishments didn't happen on the field?
To demonstrate this point, I'm going to turn to a bit of hyperbole.
What if, instead of looking at Championship qualification, we looked at Einstein qualification? What if you had to win an RCA to be able to compete there? Why aren't we celebrating them on the biggest stage that Championship has to offer?
Because, at a certain point, the
competition is about the robots. When we talk about the "rockstar" teams in FRC, it's generally teams that field great robots. We have a website dedicated to ranking the top 25
competition teams in FRC. An anymous poster who writes a column about teams' chances of winning events. Multi-hour podcasts and video blogs about how teams are performing and whether or not they're going to win. The engineering rock stars of FRC usually come from these celebrated teams.
The best part, to me, is that these rock star teams also generally get it off the field as well. There's little surprise to me that our current championship alliance consisted of two hall of fame teams. Only very rarely are the teams that we're celebrating for winning an event teams that "don't get it."
Not saying that we shouldn't include RCA, EI, and RAS winners as qualifiers for Championship. Just exploring the other side of the coin for a little while.
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Originally Posted by dodar
State borders, like Eric said, would most likely only work for Michigan. Conferences would most likely be: New England(ME, VT, NH, Mass, CT, PA, NY, RI, NJ,), Southeast(Florida, Georgia, SC, AL, MS,), East(NC, Virginia, WV, TN, KY, DE, MD, DC) Midwest(OH, IN, IL, MO), Frozen North(MN, WI, IA, ND/SD, NE)Southwest(NM, Mexico, Texas, Kansas, OK, CO, AR, LA) Pacific Northwest(WA, OR, ID, MT, WY, AK), West(CA, NV, HI, Utah, AZ), Canadian Conference(need input from Canadian CD members to help out)
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See, this is where ideas like this fall apart.
Why is Delaware in a different "conference" than Pennsylvania? There are only two teams in Delaware, and they both attended the Philadelphia regional. Heck, one of those teams has won Philly four years in a row.
What happens to Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania in this system? Only 17 of the 39 teams that attended the Pittsburgh regional this year would be allowed to attend whatever event takes it places. More than half of the teams for that event came from places that aren't part of the "New England" conference.
I could continue listing cases like this for hours. Dividing up the map into chunks like this simply isn't going to work until there's a much higher team density.