Quote:
Originally Posted by bardd
From the international perspective:
My biggest problem with this concept is time. There's simply not enough time in the competition season for 4 events in international regions.
The main reason Israel's regional is so early (week 1/2) is to give the qualifying teams enough time to prepare for champs, make travel arrangements and get money.
If you have 4 events the earliest you can have the teams qualify for champs (after the regional championship) is week 4, about a month before internationals. This means the teams would have to get enough money to fly 30 people +equipment 6,000 miles away, about 200,000 NIS from what I heard, in a month. That kind of money is hard enough to get in two months, good luck trying to do that in half the time.
Another problem, which is Israel specific, is that we can't have events on weekends, both because we have religious/mixed teams (so no doing stuff on sabbath), and because it'll make finding a venue a whole lot harder if not impossible (most places are either shut down or occupied on saturdays).
That means the events would have to be on schooldays (like our regional is now), and I bet no school would let teams miss three weeks of school for something as "unimportant" as robotics.
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If you had 2 fields, You could actually do it in such a way as having 4 events during the first two weekends, and a Championship on the thirda week, thus buying an extra week for scheduling for the World Championship.
Another option would be for the regional to buy tickets ahead of time. Hotel arrangements and plane tickets for 10 students and 2 mentors for each of the 6 qualifying teams. Possibly an extra 4 tickets for the Chairmans team as they would also need RCA presenters. This would be accomodations for about 75 people... While this would not ecompass everyone from the team, it would be a comp team, pit crew, and a few scouts. I think this would total around 500,000 NIS or about $140,000 US dollars. While not cheap, this sort of thing should be doable....
You could also do an inverted season. Start off the season with the championship, and then do "practice" style off seasons while in season. Teams going to the championship would already be decided, but others could get more play/practice during regular season and maybe talk FIRST into a wildcard slot for the #1 points team... Do the 12 flights/hotel package for the Wildcard team.