Quote:
Originally Posted by Donut
Coincidental timing that I just made this post in another thread this week, that attending a World (or Half/Quarter/N-th Part) Championship will not be a realistic goal for teams forever with the growth of the program.
Who is the National Champion for high school football? Basketball? Baseball has the Little League World Series but that is not high school teams. Eventually when your program hits a breaking point of too many teams it becomes untenable to have enough intermediate tournaments to filter down to a final champion with any credibility. Cost and time eventually become too much to attend that many events for a lot of teams, and there is also a luck factor of coming from a more difficult region. I'm not familiar with FLL at a high level but I imagine they are at that point as they can only invite 1 team per Championship tournament for each region to the World Festival based on their numbers in the marketing material. I get the argument for "one true champion" but eventually that will become an impossibility if FIRST gets an FRC team in every high school.
That said, I preferred where FRC was going with the District and Super Regional model, and think they are jumping the gun on giving up on a single World Championship (we've probably got close to 10 years before we really need to think about that). This could be a stepping stone to Super Regionals (the two events do work out for North/South SR as others have pointed out) but if that is the goal I think FIRST would be better off keeping St. Louis as is through 2017, then starting with Houston and Detroit as the Regional Championships in 2018 with a FIRST World Championship still happening. Two more years of growth is probably enough for each Regional Championship to be a 300-400 team event, and then the World Championship can be held with a smaller number of teams (200). Additional Regional Championships would be added as needed with the World Championship staying at a capped size. With this model you get the benefit of keeping the Super events capped at a size that can be more reasonably hosted in a typical sports arena/convention center combo, which is important as the 600 team event being attempted this year severely restricts your location options. I think 200-300 teams is the ideal to shoot for and whenever you push up against the 300 team limit you add another Regional Championship and reduce the At-Large bids from each that make it to the World Championship.
In the end whatever happens won't make a huge difference to me as the teams I've been with haven't attended Champs in close to a decade now. I understand the outcry from those who can count on going almost every year (the majority of ChiefDelphi's user base), but for teams that rarely qualify (the majority of FRC teams) I don't think this will change much. I just wish that the geographic repositioning would have brought things a little closer to each coast, to me the new events are still very much in the center of the country. |
I can agree with most of this - but if we allow FRC to get to a point where State Championships are enough, do we lose the community of FIRST? I will be the first to state that Minnesota's state championship lent credence to our team's success within my own school district.
However, the goal of FIRST is bigger than that - that is the magic of this program. The moment we all let go and allow regional championships be the end all, be all - we may lose everything else that makes FRC great.