[Karibou]

Its been a while since I've posted on CD and i havent been directly involved with a team since 2011, but for what its worth:

I can't speak for "higher level" teams who's goal is to win a world championship. I see how you're disappointed in the split. I'm not saying you're wrong for wanting to win big and be the definitive winner. But, I'd like to remind everyone that FIRST IS growing. Would you rather have one, proportional championship event, with no wait list and potentially nearly 1000 teams attending one event in several years? Or would you rather have more, equally competitive teams spread between two events? Or force teams to travel three weekends in a row at the end of a season to attend a district championship, then a super regional, then the world championship? Even two weekends for a super regional+worlds would be bad

Remember that these venue contracts have to be signed a few years in advance, and while the propositon may seem unreasonable now, it may work a lot better in 3 years when there are more, more competitive robots, from fantastic teams. You cant wait until growth happens, and then change the model that year, or even the year after. From my perspective, FIRST is just planning ahead.

Would you be more disappointed if you were a crucial component of a winning alliance and had a high performance robot, but could not attend CMP because only first round picks were invited to attend to keep the number of teams attending down, but you were the second round pick of the #8 alliance?

When I was in high school, my team's sole goal was to make it to eliminations of any event (regional or district). Our robot wasn't great. Heck, a couple of years we just wanted a working robot. Even with our bar set low, we were still inspired. It didn't matter to me who was crowned the best, all I see through my poor-performance-goggle is "those teams are awesome", not "omg 469 won CMP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". 1189 is currently very much in the running for one of MI's bids to CMP. The team has not attended a Championship Event since 2005. We have had two full four-year generations go by without attending CMP. Last year, the team was one of the top teams in the state and had the opportunity to go, but couldn't for financial reasons, since they had not planned for success. They no doubt deserved to go. Its obviously a slightly different view being based out of metro Detroit, but I think 1189 can relate highly to the east coast and Midwest teams (which is quite a lot of teams) who now have a closer CMP to attend with a smaller travel budget. They would be thrilled to just be able to attend. I imagine this viewpoint is probably very different than that of a team who performs well every year and qualifies for CMP every year.

Even if FIRST had split east-west, nobody would win besides those within a 10hr drive time radius. Those in the midwest would still be faced with large travel times, just as how the west coast and other areas are still faced with high travel times for the new model. There is no perfect solution to make travel reasonable for everyone, and I fully support FIRST in their choices of cities. With the current competition model, Michigan has a huge number of teams and is sending a lot to CMP, and Texas has also seen significant growth in the past few years. A LOT of teams come from the east. If we're basically splitting east-midwest+everywhere else, I don't know how someone could argue that Detroit is better than STL diatance-wise when considering convenience for the majority of teams attending, assuming that teams will be able to pick their preferred event (and we don't know that yet). Fact: there is a higher density of teams along the east coast and in MI.

Think about the big picture. Perspective is everything.