Quote:
Originally Posted by PayneTrain
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.
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This. 100 times this. The two things in play here (crowning the ultimate champion, hosting a huge FIRST celebration with the best teams there) do not necissarily have to be the same thing.
For a long time,
every single team in FIRST got to have the championship experience every year. Later,
every single team got to have it every two years, then every four years. For most of FIRST's history, this was a prominently stated objective of the way championship registration worked: for every student to get to experience an FRC world championship at least once. But more recently, this objective got further and further away from reality, and in the past few years, teams (district regions aside) have basically had to win an event/Chairman's/EI/Rookie All Star to get there. And for the most part, I think teams have been okay with this. It was a gradual progression, not an abrupt shift to the way they are now. And it makes sense for championships to be relatively exclusive -- just getting there is a pretty lofty goal, which teams work incredibly hard towards.
The dual championship model seems to be an attempt to bring things back to the way they were, and make the model where every few years, any team can simply sign up and have the championship experience, sustainable again. And while I think it's great for more students to have this experience, it can't come at the expense of having the championship be a
championship, where the best of the best go head to head. Without that, you can't learn if you truly achieved the goals you set at the start of the year.
I would be perfectly okay with, and in fact enthusiastically support, a series of massive events designed to provide the championship scale experience, alongside a FIRST-sanctioned, relatively small (IRI size would be fine), championship event, so that teams still can get the experience of seeing the Michael Jordans, Tom Bradys, and Clayton Kershaw's of FIRST playing to determine championships, and inspiring them to get to the biggest stage in FIRST someday.