Quote:
Originally Posted by dodar
When FIRST gets to that critical mass point, I see it looking like this: 50 state districts, 6 Canadian Districts, 1 Mexican District, 1 Israeli District, 1 Oceanic District, and probably a few more unknown districts(atleast unkown for now).
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I like your vision for growth, but I don't think we'll ever be organized quite that way. Two main reasons:
1. Take Montana. The population density makes it unlikely that they'll ever have enough teams to make a stand-alone district. But even if they do, they'll never have as many teams as Michigan or California or Ontario (or even Missouri), so the districts will be very unbalanced if organized by state & province.
2. Take Missouri. FRC teams are concentrated around Kansas City & St. Louis; this has lead to some very natural relationships/rivalries with teams in Kansas & Illinois, respectively. Teams cross the state to go to the "other" regional (expect like this year, when both GKC & STL were week 3
) but the majority of the relationships are with the teams in the other states. It'd be nice to keep some of that.
I'm not saying us on the MO side of GKC can't, or won't, be able to recover from not seeing the KS teams, but we really wouldn't want to (I don't think, anyway; this isn't a discussion I've had with other teams in the area). However the district boundaries are drawn, they have to keep this in mind.
I don't think it's as simple as letting teams attend events in other districts; you set up a potential issue with how points are earned towards the District Championship. Maybe those rivalries just transfer to the "super district" or "regional" championships, but that just doesn't feel right to me. I don't have a good answer -- I've thought about this, but no where near enough -- but it's one of many questions that are going to have to be addressed.