Quote:
Originally Posted by MikLast
Why isint Idaho a part of the PNW district? Would add a few teams to Events in eastern washington and help grow some teams in eastern Oregon (if a event was put in Boise) where there are not many teams (due to how far the events are for them.)
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This has been a debate for quite some time. From a geographic and financial standpoint, it would be difficult to transition all of the 20 teams in Idaho into the district at the beginning. Some of the Northern teams pushed pretty hard last year to have the ability to opt into PNW for the 2015 season and it nearly happened. Many expected it might come to fruition this year.
Even with a potential event in Boise though, the Northern Idaho teams would likely have to stay overnight at both of their district events. Had the District Championship stayed in Spokane, it might have been more viable for them. With the DCMP being held in Portland, some of those teams would have a 6-8 hour drive...
Southern Idaho would have the luxury of a home district (assuming a Boise event), but would have to travel significantly to go to either the West Valley event or one of the Oregon districts. There just aren't enough Eastern Oregon teams yet to justify a far East event.
Now you'd be asking said teams to potentially stay overnight at 3 events (2 at best), and you create significant travel costs for those teams. All of this before potentially traveling to Worlds.
Eventually PNW might have the capacity and the density in the outer region to hold events and fill the spots at them further East, but they have had enough trouble with West Valley as is and Boise would be no different. It's important to maintain similar size events and that is one thing that PNW has had to juggle pretty carefully, but has done well so far. With a region expanded that much further, PNW would struggle to find a centralized location for a DCMP, it's already been an issue that the region hasn't been able to solve the past few years.
While everyone wants there to be inclusiveness, there are so many dynamic variables when thinking about holding events, how many events to run, how to geographically place them based on density, how to maintain (roughly) equal team capacities...
I definitely would like to see our Idaho friends again, but I'm not convinced the current outcomes would be that much better than the predicament they face right now. In the mean time though, their situation isn't very great and it's only going to get worse as district borders tighten up around them
