[Mr V]

The unfortunate fact of moving to the district system is that it is not financially fair to all teams. The most remote teams, particularly those who have traditionally only attended one Regional will most likely have their budget impacted negatively. It is even worse if they move on to the DCMP and the fact is that their chances of doing so are pretty good.

For teams that have traditionally attended two Regionals, particularly those from the team dense areas their costs can go down if they don't move on to DCMP or stay about the same if they do.

Keep in mind that District events are two day events and they usually have a load-in inspection day preceding the actual event days. Because nothing other than inspection and maybe the driver's meeting happens the first evening you can get away with less than the full team attending. That means that you can get away with only 1 night of hotels for part of the team in some cases and 2 for some of the team, so the hotel budget per event should go down purely based on the number of nights. Also note that in general the hotels are less expensive in the outlying areas than in the larger cities where Regionals have been traditionally held. In some cases the cost has been half of what I paid for a room at the Regional I used to travel to.

So yes the cost of transportation will almost certainly go up but between the fewer days and often less expensive hotels the cost of accommodations is not necessarily going to go up for attending two district events that require travel vs one travel regional. However the likelihood is that a large percentage of teams will be able to attend one District event w/o having to travel.

The other factor is that depending on the events in your area the net time away from school or work will stay the same or go down, 2 District events vs 1 Regional. The typical Regional was Thur-Sat meaning two missed days while District events are Fri-Sat or some times Sat-Sun meaning a total of 2 missed days or less.

Overall however the benefit of the District system is huge. Teams that have traditionally only been able to attend a single event now get to answer that question of "if we make these changes how will it perform" or they will finally be prompted to say "what can we do to improve our performance" when they never sat down and had that conversation before. I call it getting the full engineering experience. In real engineering there is usually some sort of ongoing testing and refining until the product/solution if finalized. With FRC the real world testing is the event, yes practice and testing at your shop is beneficial but the fact is none of us really, truly knows how the game will play out overall until we get to an event. This impact is usually greater on those teams from the outlying areas because they typically do not have access to a practice field or teams that they can do at least some form of scrimmage with.

The other thing to consider is that far more teams have a chance to move on to a higher level. I've seen many cases where a community, particularly those outlying areas, have really rallied behind a team when they come to the community and say "we've qualified for the next level". I've heard of teams raising most of the cost of the DCMP entry fee in one night and on very short notice in a very small school in a very small town. Hopefully that is something that will have a lasting impact on the community and the team's finances.

Tl/DR: Yes the financial impact can hit the teams from outlying areas harder but the teams from the outlying areas typically see a greater benefit from the district system.