[EricH]

Originally Posted by PriyankP

I had the same/similar idea when I looked at the IIHF ranking system two months ago. In that system, the countries are divided into different levels, with 1-2 teams earning their way to the next level when they qualify.

Such a system in FIRST would have two levels (let's say Division A and Division B).

At first, all teams are in Division B. Any team that reaches the finals of a regional or wins an engineering related award gets promoted to Division A status for next season (or even for the next regional if the team chooses).

This gives teams a nice sandbox environment to get going first before they face the more established teams with more resources. Of course, if a team wants to downgrade, they can do so at any time.

This could also be divided into more than two levels if it is better. Need to iron out the details, but you get the idea!

The "haha, your team is a Division B team" mentality seems like the inevitable downside to this.

There is another one. I'm going to go way back into my memory banks for this one, and hope I'm remembering the anecdote right (it's on CD... somewhere--that's where I remember this from).

Back about a decade ago, during team forums after the season, someone (don't remember who) was at one in some location (don't remember where). And somebody in the room was really vocal about how all of FRC should be split in just about the manner you're describing (and remember, we're dealing with about half the teams we have today at this point in time). That's when a newbie team mentor--might have been a rookie team--who'd been rather quiet spoke up and said something about how beating (or was it playing with) Wildstang (FRC111) had been the highlight of their year, and they would lose that inspiration if the split happened. The rather vocal somebody promptly kept quiet.