Quote:
Originally Posted by Navid Shafa
Due to the way the District point system works, a team competing again for their third event hurts teams who are attending as one of their two qualifying districts. Points are not attributed to this third team’s record and are essentially removed from the system. i.e. If a team participates in eliminations or wins any awards, they are then taking away the opportunity from other teams to earn points towards the District Championship qualification system.
In my opinion, there is a significant difference between going to three regionals and three districts. Going to three regionals with the wild card system, your choices and sacrifices essentially affect only your team. As much as we all love to play robots, not every team has the choice to go to a third event in either setup, should they also be affected by the choices that other teams make? If I were hellbent on attending a third event in the current regional/district structure, I would choose to attend two districts and a regional
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Two things come to mind in relation to this:
First, don't forget that third plays serve an important role in statistically evening out the playing field across the districts. Ideally, every single spot would have been filled so that all events were the exact same size. Smaller districts make for an unfair advantage for teams attending those events as part of their first two, already it
has been shown that teams attending smaller PNW districts (like Mt Vernon or Corvallis) experience an opportunity advantage over the largest events equivalent to nearly 7 points in the district model. To mitigate this disparity, events must be as close to the same size as possible. They can either choose to be extremely strict about what events a team gets to attend (not sure what they would do short of assigning events to teams), which defeats letting teams pick convenient events, or they can let teams optionally enroll in a 3rd play, to help fill-up smaller events*. Although in a way 3rd plays are 'removing' points from the system, in the process they are making the other teams chances at those points more equal to the other larger district events. Without the 3rd plays, there would be an even greater disparity, as the same number of points would have been given out to an even smaller group of teams at the smallest events. (7 of the 29 teams attending Corvallis are 3rd plays).
Second,
The wild card system, although nice for regionals, was new just last year and is incompatible with the district model. It helps keep repeat regional teams from hogging spots that another team at the regional could have earned. There is a separate problem though that district-based teams competing in regionals outside their district were stealing spots from regional-only teams, with no recourse for the regional team to have a chance at a spot through the district. Since the district slots are based on the district's representation in the overall team total, district teams earning regional bids was unfair. So as of this year, any district team that chooses to attend a regional and wins a slot to championships at the regional not only consumes the regional ticket, but also consumes one of the finite spots slated for the district. ( See
Regional Participation, bottom of page 3).
It does get to be a lot of events (and a lot of weekends consumed), when you consider the whole gamut from 2-3 districts through championship. The real shame is that at the end of the district championship, any of us who qualify will have to decide with a weeks notice if we can afford to arrange flights (at ~$500 each) and last-minute hotels to attend. We don't have the luxury like Michigan has of hopping on a bus and driving 8 hours to St Louis, a much more affordable travel option. I expect many district slots will trickle down the ranks to get filled by teams willing and able to go (after so many events already, I wouldn't be surprised if some go unclaimed)
*
Actually, as I think about it they tried to do a little of both. If you followed the registration process closely, you probably noticed that the events were initially capped around 28 teams. Part of this was reserving spots for rookies, but another part was to make sure no event got significantly bigger than what they expected the smallest event to be (after all, they were initially planning the district venues to support up to 40 teams) As we worked through 2nd round pick and into 3rd pick, they slowly freed up more spots, until settling on the 36 team cap. In the end the disparity remained because fewer 3rd plays signed up than anticipated.