[ehfeinberg]

I see your FTC team is based in the Capital Region, so you must have either attended the Greater DC regional or the Chesapeake regional.

In general, this region was especially hit hard this build season with close to 10 snow days and school closures. This is a significant factor when last year we had at most 1 snow day. So you can see how this drastically lowered the competition.

Combine that with the Capital region being a middle of the pack region when compared to competitiveness. We also have only 2 or so regional powerhouse teams, so we do not many extremely strong teams unless national powerhouse teams come to visit the region. (233 visited Chesapeake this year, 192 in 2012, 365, 79, etc). As a result, the competitions are normally middle of the pack, DC a little below average and Chesapeake a little above DC.

Hopefully moving to a district system will help improve competitiveness next year, however I feel that the competitive will actually go down next year. The capital region has always had a large amounts of MAR teams come down to boost our competitiveness, and districts will eliminate a lot of these teams.

So in short, you saw a middle of the pack regional which had an especially weak year. Other years, Chesapeake and DC are more competitive, but not by much.