Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared Russell
I can only speak for myself, but I thought FIRST was on a really good trajectory with their Districts->Super Regional->World Championship concept. I think there's a way to implement that in a way that provides realistic (but difficult) goals to most teams, reduces team costs, keeps it to the same number of days of missed work/school and travel, and maintains a really high competitive bar at the Championship.
The Championship itself would need to become more spectator friendly in order for many of the benefits of co-locating the world's best to continue to hold, and it would be awesome for it to become the sort of event where teams send students to be inspired, learn from, and be entertained by some really awesome robots and teams.
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I envisioned the death of World Championships as we know it to come by the end of this decade (and Im not sure there is anyone who is remotely aware and active in FRC/FIRST who thinks otherwise.
I saw an ideal endgame would be to take the idea of World Championships and turn it into something like a super-IRI. A weekend in July has a 150 team event with two fields. Take the 16 super regional winners, the 4 HoF Finalists, the top 25-30 points earners over the season from each zone, and the final 10-30 spots that would be determined as some kind of wild card: a mixture of HoF teams that didn't make the points cut, the top rookies in the world, top points earners at every super regional that didn't make the cut (like a most-improved).
It's largely an exhibition, just like World Championships of any high school sport. It should be run by FRC, but you can call the award something like The Director's Cup. You can adjust the game rules to improve play at a high level, you disregard bag time, and you don't pay a registration fee to go.
You get 2 months to prepare for a truly magnificent spectator driven version of FRC. It's the All-Star game, the midsummer classic of robotics, and it's globally televised by Fox Sports 1 or NBC Sports or ESPN. They sponsor the telecast to remove the registration fees. They get two months to go out and interview and shoot b-roll of top competitors for segments. You get two fields so play doesn't have long lulls. You put the competition on a Friday and Saturday in the summer to avoid people losing vacation days or school time. You get to keep FIRST's idea of providing a championship type experience at what I think would better be known as "Zone Championships" and the idea of World Championships carries on in the FRC Grand Prix. People from all over the FRC world can come to watch and learn from the best teams. At the end, you crown the Chairman's Award Winner and the 3 Winner's of the President's Cup.