Quote:
Originally Posted by Garret
This experience has me very concerned about FIRST moving champs to a city that is supposed to be more dangerous that Oakland. The fact that just because they personally haven't experienced anything there is one of the lamest excuses I have ever heard (my personal opinion).
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As it has been mentioned before when hosting an event with 400+ FRC teams plus jrFLL, FLL, & FTC the list of possible venues and host cities start decreasing fast. Crime is common in cities. FIRST isn't intentionally booking venues in higher crime areas because they want to its because its the only places available that have the venue, hotel, food, airport, and public transportation available for teams to use. Start taking out these factors and the ability for FIRST to host the event and teams to attend becomes an issue.
Hopefully FIRST will step up and increase security more for our remaining time in St. Louis considering all of the reports of theft and nearby incidents and revisit the topic when we move to new cities. Detroit does have a bad reputation but if our friends from Michigan don't necessarily see it the same way let's take their word for it instead of jumping to conclusions. I don't see how the badge system helped this other than creating a headache for teams and more importantly spectators.
After watching the video I have a lot of concerns over how FIRST is handling the situation. I won't agree that many of the spectators in the room were as respectful as they could have been however FIRST did not handle this announcement or decision in a manner the community deserved. If they wanted a more positive outcome or reaction from the community they did a good job of encouraging the outcome they received. Even just having a moderator set the wrong tone with the attendees especially when he made the comment about remaining GP. I am concerned with the direction FIRST is moving in with regard to who is running the program and their involvement (or lack thereof) in FIRST programs and would disagree that just because you spoke to teams at XYZ events this year doesn't get you in touch with how the community feels with regard to where FIRST is going. I wouldn't hesitate to say that if the announcement were made before the competition season started the reactions from teams would have been very different.
As someone who has been a student & mentor in FLL and FRC I'm very puzzled as to why FRC needs to push for 25% championship representation whereas FLL is drastically underrepresented. It seemed the answer for FLL was to cut back on who qualified using a lottery system for State Championship while the answer for FRC is to just keep making the Championship bigger or in this case add a second.
This is disappointing to see not only the community potentially getting split but that the competition getting split. I think the beauty of FRC has been the balance between inspiration through a competition but now it looks clear that FIRST doesn't see it that way and would rather continue to hold on the current qualifications instead of having a true Championship.
I hope that FIRST will consider having a World Festival and a World Championship allowing more teams to move on to a higher level of play while still being able to crown a true World Champion.
Of course we can all hope for FIRST to push stronger in the next two years to bring more and more into the world of districts so a more even qualifying system is put in place to advance teams the right way. I'm sure many teams would agree their District Championships were more competitive than their divisions.