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Originally Posted by Greg Needel
The only solution to this that I can think of is to offer waitlist teams based on geography and performance in the season, instead of first cone first serve or time since last championship.
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The current method of allocating the number of extra spots at CMP is best described as a lottery. It is not first come first served. If you do however choose to put your hat in the ring the number of lottery tickets you get is based on the number of years since your last CMP attendance. Overall I think it does a pretty good job of allocating spots and achieving the goal of teams making it to CMP on a periodic basis.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BMSOTM
Distribute extra Wildcard slots, which I call Bonus Slots, to large regionals. It seems silly to me that the 31-team Waterloo regional and the 66-team Palmetto regional qualify the same number of teams for CMP. This can be done by awarding the remaining "waitlist" slots to regionals based on the number of teams attending minus a certain value, which I used 40 for.
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I think that this represents the biggest issue. The spots a district has is proportional to their size but it is fixed across a large range of Regional sizes. As nice as it would be I just don't see a good way to have all Regionals have a similar number of teams. So a way to give more spots to larger Regionals is not a bad idea.
Another issue is the fact that a district gets a number of spots proportional to the size of the district and teams in the district are still eligible to enter the lottery. So in at least a couple of instances last season "extra" teams from a district were awarded spots at CMP. Lottery spots were also awarded before the end of the regular season. Now I understand that it was done to ensure that declines were available to be passed down and that teams had more time to make arrangements but it did have some interesting effects.
It made some Districts send more teams than their allotment in addition to those that were pre-qualified. (PNW had two teams that won the lottery, and they earned a spot pushing their earned spot down to the next teams in the rankings) It also may have resulted in more wildcard spots being generated at week 6 Regionals, though I do not know that for a fact. IF that did happen then teams attending week 6 events had an even greater chance at earning a wild card spot than they already had.
One thing that I think might be a good option is to reserve a number of lottery spots and remove them from the available spots when calculating the number of spots for a district. FIRST does want teams to be able to attend CMP occasionally even if they are not able to meet the performance standards necessary. (I know that some people don't like that idea but FIRST has determined that best suits their goals, so it is what it is, and I'm not trying to restart that debate.)
So how about something along these lines, now the numbers are just pulled out of a hat because I really don't know the real numbers for the upcoming year with all the new districts which are causing some Regionals to go away and a couple of new Regionals that are supposed to happen.
Say there are 250 spots that could potentially be earned at Regionals and teams are 50% Regional and 50% District. So that means that there would be 250 spots to divide by the districts based on their relative size. That would mean there would be 500 spots that could be earned subtract that and the number of prequalified teams which I'll call 25 for the sake of this discussion and you have 75 spots reserved for the lottery.
That would mean that the proportion of District teams vs Regional teams attending CMP would be relative to the respective proportion of all teams, less the fudge factor caused by pre-qualified teams and the inevitable randomness of the lottery winners. Of course that would still not make it so individual states got proportional representation due to the different size of Regionals and the fact that sometimes teams earn spots outside of their home state. Of course the fact is that not all states have events and for some locations an out of state event is more convenient as a team's first or second play.
The ultimate solution of course is for all teams to participate in the District system but the District system is more work than the Regional system and some areas are a long way from having the number of teams to make the District system viable let alone having the ability to put the infrastructure in place to make it happen.