I traveled to St. Louis this season as a volunteer (working on Newton, great times there!). I have attended the Championship since 2000, including 2003, (the infamous Houston year), and every year it was held in Atlanta. However, this was my first visit to St. Louis. Here are my thoughts, as a "seasoned" FIRST veteran.
The team I mentor was fortunate enough to have a Dean's List finalist this season, but by no means had a "championship caliber" robot, and so didn't qualify by merit. We do have a team policy of trying to attend the Championship every 5 years (via pay your way/wait list), such that the majority of our members have the chance to experience it at least once in their high school career. We decided for the years between, we would only attend if we met the merit based qualification criteria. Our last trip to the Championship was in 2009, when we qualified via the Rookie All Star award at our local regional. The students who attended the Championship in 2009 were still excited and shared what a great experience they had with younger students right up to their graduation this past year. As per our policy, we decided to sign up for the Championship early this season, being the 5th year since our last Championship berth. With the wait list system working as it did this season, we didn't find out we had a Championship invitation until Wednesday, April 17th. Literally a week before the event. We had made preliminary plans to attend, researched hotels and flight options back in January, but most of that information/early reservations had been cancelled or expired due to lack of commitment. We scrambled, made some late night phone calls, had to split the team between hotel rooms for a night, but managed to pull it off and make it. (Which is why I signed up to volunteer and booked travel plans much earlier).
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Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
It also means your season is more or less at the mercy of the scheduling gods. This was compounded by the, as Jared put it, teams that weren't Championship caliber issue. I had matches at CMP where my partners put up a combined 6 discs. Is this a championship or is it an exhibition? If it's the former then we need to be a lot more selective.
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Our robot? Seeded in the mid 90s in our division. It's probably a safe bet we were one of your partners that "put up a combined 6 discs". Heck, we missed a match because our whole team was at the Dean's List ceremony that went over time. Do we care that our robot didn't perform? Absolutely. Did we try our best to fix it and improve it? Absolutely. Was it Championship caliber? Absolutely not. Were our students super inspired by the atmosphere, walking on the dome floor, seeing and playing with "elite" teams, hearing the roar of the tens of thousands of spectators, learning the iterative design and build processes and stories of other teams? You'd better believe it. These students will be talking about this experience, and using it to improve our team and robots for the next 4 years, until we either qualify with a Championship caliber robot, Chairman's or EI awards, or another 5 years elapses.
Sometimes it takes a trip to the Championships to give your students that extra inspiring kick in the pants to get them motivated enough to really work on designing, building, and iterating "Championship caliber" robots. Would you seriously want to keep teams like mine from attending the Championships so the "elite" can play one or two more matches or be less "at the mercy of the scheduling gods?"
"Is this a championship or is it an exhibition?" It's a celebration. It's inspiring. It's the end of a crazy season. It's both, championship and exhibition. If you want purely performance based competition, that's what IRI is for. The quality robots and teams will still succeed regardless of pairings or match numbers (if scouters actually provide useful information). The rest of us are there for the experience above all else. Or at least, that's what brings me back year after year.
I'd also like to add that I didn't see the Chairman's Award video for The Holy Cows, nor did I see an 1114 follow-up video from last year.