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Re: 2015 Peachtree Regional
Ray,
I agree with you on all fronts. The staff and volunteers did their best to get back on schedule after all of the delays, and I wholeheartedly appreciate their efforts to do so. Looking at the cost of fielding a robot though, I'm not sure if I agree that running 8 matches per team is the way we should proceed. I know the vision of GA FIRST is to get as many teams into FRC as possible, but we may need to step back and think about the experience.
If we count our team's sponsorship pledge that covers our registration, we still pay $4000 for a 2nd regional entrance, $3500 for a robot, $3500 for a practice robot in our case, U-haul rental service, and transport to the event. We're sinking in $11,000 + for the regional season. We played 11 + 8 = 19 quals matches in our 2 regionals. That comes out to about $578 per match for us. If we only did one event (Peachtree), we'd be paying $8000+ for 8 quals matches, $1000 per match. Many other teams don't put in the money we do into the program, and others don't have the sponsors we do. If we assume $5000 + $4000 for the registration and robot cost, teams are paying $1,111 per match. I think sinking that type of money and only fielding your robot 8 times isn't worth it.
I think we need to re-evaluate the experience we give teams, and maybe go away from 60+teams at an event. Even if we go down to 60 teams, we can run the same number of qualification matches, giving 48 teams an additional qualification match. If we go down to 58 teams at the event, every team is guaranteed 9 matches in quals, running on the same schedule we had this year. I don't know how we can make this happen, but maybe restricting the initial capacity to 54 during registration gives room for 4 rookies/exceptions to be added in at the last minute.
Mulling things in my head, it may finally be time for our state to go to districts.
__________________
Team 1002: 2008-2012
Team 1648: 2012-2016
Georgia Tech Class of 2016
Last edited by Anupam Goli : 29-03-2015 at 23:16.
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