Quote:
Originally Posted by Daskov
As Canada is moving to the district system in a few years, this will really limit the number of Canadian teams able to go to World Champs. Needless to say, I am very disappointed with the news.
FIRST World Champs heavily pushed starting new teams, and then they do this. There is already some bias against Canadian teams, as many of us Canadian's have found over the years, so this plus the districts feels like they are really pushing us aside.
I hope that this is not needed in 2016.
|
I'm a little bit curious about this line of thought. I know historically there has been a large amount of flak directed at Canadian teams travelling to other regionals (like 1114 at Pittsburgh in 2011, ugh), but I'm not sure how FIRST pushing for Canadian/Ontario districts can be taken as "pushing Canadian teams aside." Could you elaborate? My understanding of the District model is that regions are given a number of slots based on the amount of teams they have relative to the total amount of FIRST teams/the amount of teams attending Champs. Isn't the model just bringing the amount of Canadian teams attending Champs into proportion? I remember an analysis last year that Ontario was the most overrepresented region at Champs*. I get that frankly Ontario is one of, if not the most competitive, region in the world, but proportionally it does end up soaking up a lot of spots at Champs. I haven't seen any data from this year though, so I can't comment on whether it was the same in 2014.
*Full disclosure, Minnesota was the most underrepresented if I remember correctly