Quote:
Originally Posted by Siri
It's not just match throughput. Where do you put the extra pits (and fields)? It's tight in here. It does take lots of extra volunteers--almost everyone for the 4 extra fields, plus more inspectors, judges, and crowd control at least. Not to mention extra FedEx donations, all kinds of supplies, and any number of other things we don't know about. |
As far as I understand it, we were only using 1 of several halls in the building housing the pits. I know thats how it was in Atlanta. Additionally, it seems to me from that map that there's a bunch of extra space in the FLL pits (the gaps between them, specifically).
No matter which way you slice it, you either have to start qualifying less teams to CMP or make CMP bigger, as the program is already filling CMP to capacity, and each year a couple more regionals come online. If that means that CMP's current home can't hold us, then so be it.
You can't chop the 6 teams that qualify from a regional (the winning alliance should go, and celebrating RCA/EI/RAS winners is critical to FIRSTs mission), which means the only answer from that front is to migrate more regions to the district model, but it still doesn't solve the problem. Its not fair to district model adopting regions to kneecap their number of available CMP berths relative to regions where the traditional regional model is used, so IMO, the ONLY viable option is for the big show to get bigger. For the big show to get bigger, it needs more space for pits, more volunteers, and more fields, for more match throughput (since we all know <9 matches per robot is just unacceptable.)
To me, 4x doublefield divisions is less of a strain on the system than 8x single field divisions. You can get away with fewer volunteers (note: this may vary by game [in 2013 for example, field reset were often used to help with scoring]) for field reset, scorekeeping, refereeing, and more.