[Craig Roys]

You do not need to do a State/Regional Championship in order to benefit from the district model...by that I mean if you don't have a high enough concentration of teams for a state or regional championship then don't. However, teams could still benefit from playing more smaller competitions for less.

Say there's only 40 teams in a particular region; would you rather play one regional for $4-5k and get around 8-10 matches and maybe eliminations; or would you want to play two events against the same teams for the same amount of money and get 24 matches (12 per event) plus any elimination matches? Maybe you've got 60 teams in a particular area; then you could put on three 40 team competitions where all the teams register for any 2 of them. I'm sure there are many other ways to organize something around this idea.

The whole idea is more matches for less money. More time competing with the robot you spent 6+ weeks working on. If FIRST is going to continue to grow, it has to become more affordable for teams with more ROI. I'll admit that I was a little bit skeptical when the FiM system was initially introduced, but I can't see ever going back. Our first 3 years as a team (2006-2008) we averaged between 12 and 13 matches per season from our initial investment. In our past 3 years (2009-2011) we averaged between 33 and 34 matches per season from our initial investment (which, I believe, was less than the initial registration cost for the first 3 years). If you take out eliminations since those aren't guaranteed matches; then we averaged around 9 matches per season for the first 3 years for our initial registration vs a guaranteed 24 matches per season now from our initial registration. Even if there were no State Championship, I would still prefer this model because it gets you more playing time for less money.