Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Wallace
I think the LV area has upwards of 2 million residents and about forty high schools. If our one high school in a community of about 8 thousand can host a district competition, surely one (or more) of those LV high schools can do it.
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Not to put too fine a point on it, but of the roughly 50 high schools nearest me, I can only think of 5, max, that would fit the bill, just from space, not even counting schedule. L.A. has a similar population density to some areas of Vegas. You guys are 1/1, we're 1/10 if that. Some of our high schools could probably fit their entire athletic areas, football field gym and all, into the space used by IRI (including theater and possibly the neighboring swim area).
Here's the thing: Out here, high schools are rather space-constrained by neighborhoods. If any given high school (let alone middle/elementary schools) needs to expand, they have only one place to go: straight up. Or straight onto the athletic fields, which are probably about the only open space for a few hundred yards. Bigger gym? Sorry, there goes the X building. Oh, we need that? Guess we've gotta build a taller building for Y so we can eliminate the need for X. Wait, the Z regulation forbids that? Guess we gotta modernize the gym and skip the expansion. You get the picture. And when something does get budgeted for and built, it can take YEARS. (A local high school put a theater in recently. I think it opened up about 3-4 years ago. They started back when I was in middle school, as I recall. Might be off on the times, but it took a very long time to put up.)
In the Midwest, there's a lot of more open land. True, there's a lot of farmland in use. But the point is, there is very little space at a high school to put a facility that can handle a robotics competition out here, and the existing facilities were generally built when high schools were smaller, smaller athletic departments, you get the picture.
If I can only think of 5 high schools that can maybe handle a district from a space standpoint, and one farther out that definitely can, in a much bigger city area than Vegas, then maybe "We can host a district and we're smaller than you in population" isn't the sort of thing that will help the problem. I've heard that one of the issues with going to a district system in CA is the venues, or lack thereof--as a state, we've got more area and more population, and have had more teams at times, then most of the current district areas. Therefore, there must be something else that is keeping us from going to districts, and suitable venues is a likely suspect, though certainly not the only one.