Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Anderson
I always heard one dominant reason: the quantity of teams in Michigan was too high for all of them to be able to participate in one of the three "local" regional competitions, and there weren't any good places to add more full-scale regionals.
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Not True:
The primary motivation behind FiM was financial.
It was a financial consideration on several fronts, but trust me, the reason it happened when it did, the way it did was because the traditional system would have likely bankrupted FRC in our region in 2009 if we had not done this.
The District System saves money for teams and the regional committees in several ways: reduced travel costs, lower entry fees, lower cost per match, no shipping, 2 day events; but the
really, really big item is lower event production costs. The low cost events as we piloted them in 2008-2009 can often be run for less than 10% of traditional FRC event costs. In 2012, the annual savings from doing this in our State is nearly one Million Dollars! Per Year! This is huge because we can still raise much of this money from the sponsoring companies, but instead of blowing it all on lights, AV, and roadies from the East coast, we can use this money to fund teams and new local growth.
All of the competitive restructuring we did at the same time was related to other goals and motivations we had desired for years, so we included all of this in the system we proposed in 2008 and are much better for it. We want to increase opportunity and availablity of events for our teams, and increase the competitive level of the sport, so we did.
Increasing the Return on Investment of FRC is one of our primary goals at FiM. To increase ROI, you can reduce costs, you can improve returns, or ideally you do both. The District system does both very effectively. Our hope is that as more regions migrate, that collectively we can discover even better ways of operating. FRC is filled with some of the smartest people on Earth, and together we can make anything better than it is today. FRC in its traditional form is simply too expensive. We took a big first step toward reducing the price point of participation, but there are many more opportunitites for futher improvement.
100 years ago Henry Ford, one of the great innovators of the modern age, was viewed as a genius with his revolutionary business model to lower a product's cost and the company's profit margin in exchange for increased sales volume. The result made the automobile available to many, many more people instead of just the rich, made Ford Motor Co. very wealthy, and changed the culture of our society. Win, Win, Win,
This century old idea applies well to FIRST:
We want FRC available to everyone, just as Henry Ford did.
We want to change our society, just as Henry Ford did.
He dramatically reduced consumer costs to achieve the accessability needed to achieve this goal. FIRST should do the same if they ever want to achieve the results Dean envisions. High costs are a deterent to growth, and rounding up grants from big companies is not the same as systemic cost reduction. Some of the statements in the 5 year plan give me hope that the leadership of FIRST have finally realized this, but we will have to wait an see.
BJC is right, I have been writing a District description paper with some of this back history and justification on and off for a while. Life keeps getting in the way, and every time I pick it back up, I feel the need to rewrite it all over again. I will complete and post this someday soon.