Glad to hear Districts will be coming to the Southeast US in the next year or two! It's a huge improvement to the regional model, imho! You can really see it helping out FIRST teams throughout New England... many teams, young and old, had become stagnant and just hadn't been as productive... now you see many teams really thriving (again)!
My suggestion would be to try to create Districts larger than a single state... while Indiana has definitely proved you can do it with a ~40-50 team state, I think the dynamic really works best when you have ~80-150+ teams. That's large enough to really get the benefit of playing with teams at the DCMP you haven't competed with before, and to create a big group of teams with a strong sense of solidarity.
While the 'Super Southest Region' of everyone south of the Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi seems a little unreasonable for a District CMP, I think having 3 or 4 districts that encompass this region would probably be a reasonable number. Obviously if Districts got well above 250 teams or so, they may want to start splitting apart... but then again Michigan seems to be doing well with its 350 team district!
Seems like the 'cores' of some potential Districts in the SE could be:
- Virginia & Maryland
- Georgia & South Carolina
- Florida?
- Tennessee?
- West Verginia would most likely join with Virginia and Maryland (but could perhaps join an Ohio & Western PA district).
- North Carolina could probably join with either Virginia and Maryland or with Georgia and South Carolina.
- Florida could potentially become it's own district, but joining with Georgia and South Carolina would also make some sense (more so if NC were to join VA and MD)
- Alabama would probably join with Georgia and South Carolina, although with plans to host their own Regional in 2016, that would seem to push that timeline out to at least 2017.
- Kentucky could form a smaller district (~50 teams) with Tennessee, or perhaps try joining with TN, VA, WV, and MD for a large district of >200 teams... although spread out across a larger and longer area than the PNW.
A Possible Set of Combinations:
- Capital Region: Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina and Washington DC
- 178 Teams (in 2015)
- 133,300 sq mi
- Southeast Region: Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and Alabama
- 175 Teams (in 2015)
- 209,700 sq mi
- 'Central' Region: Tennessee and Kentucky
- 57 Teams (in 2015)
- 82,600 sq mi
- Mississippi River Region: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi
- 54 Teams (in 2015)
- 153,500 sq mi