Quote:
Originally Posted by Frenchie461
If FIRST could get FRC affordable so teams could do more with less. Get rid of the official FIRST lighting and sound people. For example, at the BMR, college students would have done just as good of a job on lighting and sound for a whole lot less. With several changes like that, a regional could be down to 1500 or so per team, making it a lot more accessible to schools that are only able to afford FTC.
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This is basically what the Michigan district system does. We built our own field hardware and volunteers transport it to each event (we still rent/borrow all the electronics from FIRST). We get field tech support from FIRST as well but have our own trained FTAs.
There is no production company. There is no extra lighting other than whatever is in the venue. The sound/DJ/ A/V is sometimes the school's and/or rented or other volunteered gear.
You do lose some production value, the venues are smaller but since there are ~40 teams per district it isn't an issue. The experience for the teams is almost the same and definitely outweighs the cost (2 districts for the price of one regional).
So it does take a lot of extra volunteer overhead and leadership (The FIRST in Michigan board members) to pull it off. Might be hard to do if you start spreading the areas to encompass 4-5 states.