[Chief Hedgehog]

None of this makes any sense to me. None of it.

Cost: Spreading out any event/convention/championship does not reduce the amount of money needed to conduct it. Even if FIRST doubles the amount of teams involved (FLL, FTC, FRC) - you still need double the amount of the Volunteer Army needed to make this happen. Yes, I know that volunteers are unpaid, but there is still the issue of housing and transportation...

This is a very simplistic analogy - but most FRCers know most effective and cost-effective way to win a game of Risk: take Australia. Why? Because it is a bottleneck. The quickest way to lose Risk? Try and hold Asia. Now, this analogy is better served if we compared Australia to South America. Same amount of resources, double the expense. With one Championship, FRC had a bottleneck.

Number of teams: Here in is the real problem. Many teams struggle to get to a place where they can afford to make it to two Regionals ($9000). Now we are looking at doubling the amount of teams that can make it to a Championship event? That means that twice as many teams are going to be looking to their sponsors or their students to fund another event hundreds or thousands of miles away! We all see the threads on this forum about teams struggling to make it to Championships now - can you imagine if 800-1200 teams are qualifying for these events?

Watered down: Yes, the Championships this season seems watered down by allowing another 200 teams to qualify/waitlist. I will state this, my team made it in 2013 by winning our regional and being our region's RAS. Either way that we made it, the experience was profound on the development of our team. I think by keeping Champs open to the 6 awards offered up in each regional was sufficient.

in 2014 we did not qualify.

We came back this season with the best robot that we ever built. It was beautiful. The practice robot did everything we wanted it to do. The drive team practiced for 20 hours each week. Yet, come competition, our Comp Robot failed to connect properly with the field. We couldn't move properly until round 9 - and even then they only stacked two totes and placed a Container on top. This was a failure for FRC 4607. We knew that we had no shot at Champs, and this was fine with us. We just wanted to showcase what our robot could do... and we never were able to fulfill this. To my kids credit - they want to build a better drive train and figure out how we prevent this from happening next season. (I will be honest - I have been in a near-catatonic state ever since...) What I will state is this - our robots work great now, so look out those of you that compete at MRI and Minne-Mini.

Other Outlets: FRC would be wise to promote other outlets such as IRI, and the Minnesota State Tourney. Case in point - last season we missed out as we lost in North Star's Semis. It sucked. The kids were pissed about the ruling. But you know what happened? They came back into my shop and had a fire in their belly - they wanted to showcase the robot in the Minnesota State Tourney. They did just that finishing just behind team 2175 - the Fighting Calculators. Our alliance put up a great fight and we walked away with Runners-up at the MSHSL tourney. That Banner now hangs next to our 2013 State Champs Banner and the 2005 Girls Basketball Champions Banner in our gym.

FRC 4607 went from 8 kids interested in robotics in 2012 to over 50 kids this season. However, we did not make it last year or this year. Yet, next season we already have 40 kids grades 9-12 signed back on - and we had 12 seniors!

What FIRST needs to realize is that they need to practice what they preach. This is a competition - we want the champions. We want to know what we are up against.

And as I always tell my kids: Failure is always an option. It is what you do after you fail that defines your character.