Quote:
Originally Posted by DareDad
I hope not. I despise the districts concept from a volunteer perspective. I'd rather see a fifth regional (Fargo/Moorhead or Rochester) than a dozen district events. I can do three weekends during competition season, but if the area goes to districts the expectation will be twice that and I can't commit to that.
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I agree, the number of volunteers would need to grow. I'm extremely happy that 2512 hosted an off-season event this year as off-seasons are a great way to grow your key-volunteer base.
That being said, if Minnesota were to magically switch to districts this year, I would be curious to see if the cost would be worth the benefit. I did a quick (in retrospect, maybe not so quick) analysis using last year's numbers below
If we assume that district events have 40 teams at them, and that there are 186 teams in Minnesota, we would need 9.3 events in order to allow all teams to have two plays. That means we would need to round that number up to 10 events total (not including state championships) spaced out over 6 weeks. That would give us 400 spots for teams to compete at and there would be 28 spots left over.
If each event has a 12 qualification matches, that is 880 matches total (not including eliminations). Last year, there were 392 non-elimination matches played in Minnesota. If you take a registration fee of $5000 and divide it by the number of matches, you get a cost of $500/match for the regional system and $208.33/match for the district system.
If you were to run the district system in a FIRST Tech Challenge-type style where you have a host team that provides non-key volunteer support and a location to host the district event, I calculate you would need around 35 volunteers for each event, not including the host team volunteers. That is a total of 350 individual volunteer positions that need to be trained for and filled. If run with the assumption at all of our trained volunteers, volunteer twice in a season, that is 175 trained volunteers needed total (this number does not include state).
This is of course all hypothetically speaking and doesn't really take into account that you would need to host a couple of 2 event weekends. Nor does it take into account that we would need an official MN non-profit to run all of these events.
In the end, I think that districts in MN would be a HUGE benefit to all teams but there are a few hurdles we need to leap through before we can get there.