[David Lame]

I'm relatively new to First. I've got just two years of experience as a mentor.

My first year was really inspiring to me, and a big part of that was seeing a world championship event, watching the whole world come together to have the best teams compete in front of a crowd of screaming fans. It was genuinely awe-inspiring.

You can't have two championships. You can have zero or one.

Commitments have been made already. Some things aren't going to change. I don't know which things could be renegotiated and which cannot, but I'm pretty sure a lot of this plan is set in stone and can't be undone, at least for a few years, so I'm not going to say what ought to be done, because I don't know what the real options are.

I'll talk about one thing, from my own perspective. There have been a lot of posts mentioning goals and tradeoffs about the world championship events. There are a lot of factors that have to be considered, and maybe when all of them are considered, there really isn't any better way to do it than to eliminate the world championships. (I won't say "split" them. A split championship is no championship at all.) However, of all the goals that are considered, the one that I would get rid of first is the idea that every team ought to have a chance to participate in the World Championship on some sort of regular basis.

I feel like I don't have to be physically present at the championship venue to be part of it. When I talk to my students, I talk about a road that ends in Saint Louis, and how we want to go as far along that road as possible. If we didn't get very far along that road this year, we can look and see what we can do to get a little farther next year. We might not make it, but just having the destination in mind makes me feel like I'm part of that big, global, event called the world championships. Somehow, struggling to go as far as possible on the road to a world championship is more inspiring than having an easier path to half a championship.

Well, that's the way I feel about it anyway. Others may see it differently.