Quote:
Originally Posted by ehochstein
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).
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Evan, your numbers are a little low. Every event requires a minimum of 10 inspectors, 15 judges, 5 or more refs, scoring, queueing... I believe we at the state tournament last year (30 teams, 1 day event) we needed over 100 volunteers to make it happen. Even if we get 50 volubteers from every "host team", we won't have enough. And as it stands, those "host team" volunteers would be inexperienced, and having that many learning on the job would lead to poor experiences for teams.
As things stand today, a disproportionate percentage of our volunteers come from the twin cities. While that would make doing a bunch of district events around here easy, going out to Fargo or La Crescent or St. Cloud or Rochester would be extremely difficult. How many volubteers are we going to require to go out for a weekend just to put on those events, especially when their teams aren't there competing?
If we really want to go to districts, and I've heard teams say they do, then we need every team to step up and give us more volunteers. Using LRI's as an example, we have 2 in the cities and one in La Crescent. A couple more prospective ones from the cities, but that's it. Despite looking, I haven't Been able to find someone appropriate from the Duluth or Fargo or St. Cloud areas. We just don't have people from those areas volunteering as inspectors very much. You would think with two regionals in Duluth we could get some local key volunteers, but most of the ones I can think of are from the cities or other areas.
So a word to all MN teams: we have almost 200 teams in the state right now, yet we get volunteers from maybe 10% oft hose teams. Give us volunteers now and we might be able to get on a path towards districts. Without Training up a bunch and having them well diversified across the state we'll never get there. This is the problem those of us attempting to recruit volunteers know we have, but when we come to the teams we just get "sorry, we don't have anyone that can do it this year" emails. You can't ask for something without helping to make it happen.