Here is my list.
1. St. Louis in general. I’m sure a lot of teams were able to bus it in from other parts of the country, but for those of us who flew in, most of us probably had to connect through another hub city. I can only imagine how annoying this must be for those teams flying from international/rural destinations. I hope FIRST considers this aspect when they look at potential bids after next year’s Championship Event.
2. Increase qualification matches at CMP: I’m sure there is something that can be done to add matches to the schedule without reducing the number of teams. This would mean that you would likely have to add time. I personally came up with something like this
Quote:
Thursday
8AM-11AM: Practice Matches
12PM-8PM: Qualification Matches
Friday
9:30AM-7:30PM: Qualification Matches
Saturday
8AM-11AM: Qualification Matches
2PM-7PM: Elimination Matches with the division finals played on Einstein so that those matches can double for testing communications for the field.
7PM-Cont. Closing Ceremonies/Finals on Einstein.
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This makes space for about 180 qualification matches on a 7 minute cycle. You could have gotten ten matches for each team with only 166 qualification matches. Even running at a 7.5 minute cycle, you would get 168 matches. I’m sure teams could get the breaks that they wanted for lunch and other things on Friday (Look at 148’s schedule; they didn't have a single match Friday until around 1:15pm). Frank addressed this in his e-mail earlier today, so I’m sure this is something FIRST is looking into.
As for the part I have about Saturday. I think you can tie in things like the talent show/dance/top 5 exciting matches during the season and make the Finals the Finale as well.
3. Real time scoring needs improvement (already beaten to death)
4. Qualifying for Championship should be changed. Maybe something like
this?
5. FIRST needs better infrastructure for media sources. What do I mean by this?
a. An actual PR effort instead of handing out 8GB flash drives with just 15 or so pictures form the New York City Regional on them along with a bunch of other text files. (that’s what those cool little FIRST bracelets that looked like powerbands were.)
b. Include the basics to create a webcast as part of the kit that travels with the fields around the country during the regional events. (Even if its’ at 480p for the first few years) and use this to your advantage. The faster FIRST can standardize things when it comes to media like this, the better the media opportunities for FIRST will get. Imagine utilizing this to have live look-ins for other regional events during timeouts or breaks, Imagine having the top 5 most exciting matches of the year replayed on the Einstein big screen instead of throwing paper airplanes waiting for match results… It would be easier for a media provider to pick up FIRST if all the infrastructure for the media was already created.
c. Pushing to try and get network executives/people in the sports broadcasting industry as part of the administration in FIRST. Having an insiders’ track to land a major media opportunity would be huge for this program.
6. Let's try to get a bigger space for Karthik next year instead of
this.
That’s all I could think of right now, otherwise this has been an excellent season.