[brandon.cottrell]

Alright. I'll be the first person to say I'm not so sure about this.

While I like the idea of certain awards being district level, because many teams deserve Quality awards, Innovation in control and Industrial design; I feel like with certain awards making them district level extremely decreases their sentimental worth. With a lot of teams it's difficult to explain awards like Chairman's to people outside of FIRST, but with things like Imagery it's as simple as: "They said we were the best looking out of the ~200 teams there". Now it's something more like: "They said we were the best looking, but only out of the 60 we were with and 3 other teams also won this award and they were really cool too."

The other thing that puzzles me is FIRST tries to stress that EI is not a "second place" to Chairman's. But now that 4 teams win it a year as opposed to 1, and the Championship eligibility is now only for 1 year, they are very unequal (Also on a side note, has anyone noticed that they call it a "Regional Chairman's Award" and an "Engineering Inspiration award"?).

While I can't really argue with the way FIRST works, and I'm very gracious to be in it, this kinda gets to me.