[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by cadandcookies

I think this is the big thing that gets missed in discussions about Minnesota going to Districts. Right now, the organizational structure for FRC in Minnesota is at best opaque and at worst comes off as exclusionary to teams outside the Twin Cities area, at least at the decision making level.

From where I'm standing (at the bottom, looking straight up, and without any inside knowledge) Minnesota needs some sort of exterior push to go to districts-- the system we have now is hindering us from progressing to districts. When we only have two weekends in the state with events, it makes it much easier to keep the same volunteers (and teams), which is a double edged sword-- it means the volunteers we do have tend to be very well seasoned and well trained, but it makes it much more difficult to train new volunteers, both in the practical sense that the slots for our existing regionals seem to be mostly filled, but also that from a team's perspective there isn't a need for them to be volunteering when everything seems to be under control.

On a little bit less of a concrete of a note, I also get the feeling that at the decision making level, there simply isn't much support within Minnesota for districts. I might be wrong (like I said, I'm pretty far outside the know for this), but that's the impression I've gotten.

We have a lot of talented and invested people here in Minnesota that currently aren't being utilized for FRC-- a sponge can only hold so much water. Maybe if we had a bigger sponge, we'd have more room for volunteers and a bit more diversity with who's filling volunteer positions.

Trust me, there's still plenty of room for more people to volunteer, especially in key roles. The only reason it seems that "all the slots are taken" is because people are pulling double duty all over the place filling those roles both in Duluth and Minneapolis... and they're only doing that because we need them to in order to get the events to run. We're desperately looking for people with the "right stuff" to hold those key volunteer roles and doing our best to train them in when we do identify them. Unfortunately, they don't grow on trees.

Speaking of the discussions I've had with others helping to run things here, the common theme is "Districts are coming... and we're not ready yet". We're working on it.