Quote:
Originally Posted by BrennanB
Go look at any major sport at the highest level. Basketball, baseball, soccer, football. How many people make it to the NBA, MLB, NFL, etc? Now look at how many people have ever played that specific sport. A few hundred make it to these leagues. A few millions have played the sport. Then tell me that sports haven't influenced/changed people's lives.
Live changing will occur regardless of champion split. The question is, which one does more of it.
In life everyone isn't a winner to the same degree. Not everyone can be a CEO of a large company, not everyone can be a rockstar, not everyone can be a pro athlete. All of these "goals" are extremely rare. Imagine if 20% of all your friends were millionaire CEO's. Imagine if 20% of them expected to be millionaire CEO's.
It's a hard question, and one that society as a whole hasn't really had a competitive field where a massive number of individuals/teams are at the very top of success. I still think it's not the best direction for FIRST. We know small numbers of teams/people at the top is inspirational. Do large numbers of people at the top have the same effect? I feel like it doesn't, but I have no examples because everyone else uses the "small percentage format"
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Nobody was complaining about 25% of teams going to the championship in years past. Nobody was shouting "EVERYBODY CANT BE WINNERS! THERE ARE TOO MANY TEAMS HERE!!"
You also have to look at the turnaround on sports vs the team turnaround here. The smaller the percentage of teams going, the more "repeat offenders" you're going to have. While I love watching Einstein, it gets old seeing the exact same teams every year. It's still inspiring to a degree, but it's the same exact teams year after year. Do you really want to see a championship where it's the same 5% of teams every year for 5 years in a row? (Warning. Exaggeration but you get my point).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Siri
With only 0.5% of teams attending the current Worlds model, you'd need 60 "championsplits". Predicting that we can preserve the championship experience spilt in half is one thing. 60ths is a super regional experience. Nothing wrong with that, but that's an entirely different FRC that's decades away at least. We currently have no idea what it'd mean to FIRST performance metrics to have that level to advance to without also having Worlds to aim for, and even that's only been discussed abstract. It (0.5%) is an unrealistic dichotomy for today's situation that exaggerates the current issue past it's real cost-benefit discussion. Who knows what the "history of the structure of FIRST" post will like by the time we're facing that balancing act (e.g. is 60 necessary or is 58 okay, because those last two venues are really pushing it?)
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We aren't that far away. Look at the growth curve of FRC, FTC, and FLL. It's been almost an exponential growth for a while now, with FTC growing the most rapidly. Many FTC teams I have heard from hate how so few teams can go to champs. They have a much smaller percentage of teams that make it to worlds. FLL is even smaller than that. Many FLL and FTC teams have no hope of ever going. They're not inspired to do better so that they can go, they're discouraged that it is the same teams every year that go, because the championship has not grown at all with their team growth. The number of teams going to worlds is the same as it was many years ago, and there are thousands more teams. I think this is a pilot for a super-regional model anyway. They just don't want to have everyone jump into it feet first. Whether that is the right approach or not, I'm not really sure. But that's probably what they're trying out, if I had to guess.
And going with a "teams should get the opportunity to go every 4 years" won't really work either, when you're talking about the same number of teams I'm thinking about.
We're really not that far away. Our growth is not really on a steady incline last I checked. It's increasing by more every year. And with the legislation going through congress that RUSH and the Advocacy Conference is focused on, we could see even greater growth.
Regardless of all of that, we are still running out of venue space that can handle these big events. St. Louis is over capacity right now. I imagine Deteoit and Houston will be at capacity too. So we might see championship events that are actually smaller than we are used to in the future. 600 teams at a championship is too many, imo. 8 fields is too many for one event. We all just get lost in the shuffle pretty much. Judging is a nightmare. The way the venue flows is a nightmare.
No, not everybody can be winners. But nobody is really advocating that, are we? That's the very definition of a straw man argument. We're not giving everybody a world championship winners trophy. Just giving more people the experience. But the same percentage of teams the championship experience as we had before.