Quote:
Originally Posted by Ginger Power
I'm not sure how I feel about CA winners automatically qualifying... I like that we're rewarding the teams that win the most prestigious award in FIRST, but it doesn't necessarily bring the best teams to the competition. Although if your team is winning CA, you probably have a competitive team anyways, at least that's what I gather by checking out past winners.
I definitely know how I feel about a teams second event not counting. If the goal of the state championship is to have all the best teams in the state competing to figure out the best of the best then you have to count a second regional. You can do an average of the results of the first and second regionals to maintain some parity, but the teams that go to 2 events will get better at their second event.
If the goal of the state championship is anything other than figuring out the best of the best... then don't call it a state championship.
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I think there's a little nuance you're not bringing out here. If the goal is to have the best teams, teams who win RCA at their first event seems like an excellent way to ensure you get some of them. If the goal is to get the best robots, it obviously misses the mark, but that particular goal seems to do less to inspire kids and be what FIRST is about, that I would ignore it. (Admittedly, I wasn't there last year but...) I would love to see the MSHSL State Championship hand out awards to teams. Maybe they would be similar/the same/analogous to the normal FIRST set, or whittled down to a few important ones due to judging constraints, but I think that would go further in "figuring out the best of the best" in the right ways.
The problem with counting second events or not is fairness. If teams simply got credit for the better of the two events, (or even both events!) that would be obviously unfair in favor of teams with more resources. Averaging the two dampens the effect, and certainly allows a second event to harm teams, but many teams do tend to do better at later events, both through iteration, and sheer student experience, so you're still advantaging teams with more resources. Picking the first event seems to be the closest to rewarding "competitive" teams, while giving all teams a fair opportunity.
And on the topic of you "speaking for all teams" when saying that winning state is a big deal, it obviously isn't all of them, but the last time I was in MN, there were a good number of teams who see Winning State as a big deal, whose relationships with their districts and schools would be improved by winning an MSHSL banner, and would be further legitimized in their community. And I'm not sure those folks are well-represented on CD. I think it's not universal, but should be taken seriously. And MNFIRST knows this, and maintains a positive relationship with the good folks at the MSHSL.