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Unread 14-08-2013, 23:11
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Re: FRC Blogged-Something New--Early Release of Event Dates

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pault View Post
Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't anybody else suprised that there are only 2 districts in Massachusetts. Seriously. That ratio of teams to districts in New Hampshire and Conneticut is ~14.5, but in Massachusetts it's 27 (I'm pulling these numbers off the top of my head, so they may be slightly off).There is just no way that this is going to pan out equally. Even assuming that there are no out of state teams coming into Massachusetts, there are no rookie teams, and each event holds a full 40 teams, over half of all Massachusetts teams will be forced out of state.
Im not at all surprised. If you take a look at this map, it shows the distribution of teams, and you can zoom into NE. You can see how heavily weighted the MA teams are to the east, and how the density of teams in general is weighted towards southern NE.

The official breakdown of teams from 2013 is
57 in MA (33 of which are w/in 25mi of Boston - which for a state that is over 150mi wide, thats a pretty heavy concentration)
45 CT
29 NH
14 ME
6 RI
3 VT

For Reference the WPI event is 46 miles from Northeastern. Nashua is 48 miles, and Bryant (RI) is 52mi. WPI to Hartford is 64mi. WPI to Southington is 82mi. You can see that "being forced out of state" is really not a significant difference in travel.

Plus with the number of MA teams that traveled to other events like BAE or Pine Tree or CT, I don't think having teams that want to go out of state for events will be that much of an issue.

And the other thing you need to take into account when you look at where the events are is potential host locations, and potential committees. Trust me, most teams would rather have a well run district event in a good venue that might take an extra 30min to drive to than a really poorly run event in a bad venue that might be 30min closer. Plus with the District Championship in Boston, I would think MA teams could hardly complain...

If you guys want to volunteer to staff a committee to run another Boston area District event & have a good venue available, I'm sure people would be all ears for 2015 .
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