[PayneTrain]

As this thread approaches a point where it is best off locked up from the denizens of this corner of the internet, I just want to make sure that it's pretty clear it's now impossible to buy into the meme that Minnesota can't move to the district system because of a lack of a volunteer base.

Sure, my only experience with Minnesota comes from
a) flying up there to canoe one summer (it was great, thanks nature!)
b) the Saints beating the Vikings in the NFCCG (sorry Vikings fans)

but I live in a region that really seemed to hate the idea of moving to districts. Just couldn't seem to find x or y. New executive director for the state's 501c3 comes in and says "yo, we're doing this now" and people FREAK OUT. WE'RE NOT READY! HOW WILL THE EARTH CONTINUE TO SPIN WITHOUT HAVING A DEEP BENCH OF GAME ANNOUNCERS [or other KV position here]."

We're going into our last week of districts and hell yeah, there have been growing pains. We had to wait 3 hours to get inspected at our first event. But hey, my first thought was "wow, guess we need to get some of our to-be alums trained up to be RIs" not "wow, guess I need to tell the internet how much districts suck." We went to the first event to spectate and hoo boy, some stuff was rough. But hey, first district, a lot of KVs brand new to their positions, refereeing is hard this year and the barrel plugs on these radios are nightmare fuel. The only problem was the grotesque number of the infernal FRC parody videos everyone had to sit through.

The biggest victory of the district system? Coaches got an email a week before the district saying "hey, we NEED people for these positions." I ring up a couple alumni from the local college and they leap right into it. We had one alum get the opportunity to go from high school senior last season to Game Announcer this season. And he KILLED it. One of the clearest, most enthusiastic and confident GAs I have heard in a long time. Sure I'm biased because I know him, but also I know that he was very green but wanted to do the job well. He will be doing the job this weekend and I expect great things.

If he was a Golden Gopher instead of a Hokie, he would be told he wasn't even old enough to run FIELD RESET this year. How are you going to engage your alumni to further advance your program when you tell them to man safety glasses until someone almost quite literally dies? MN's RPC has triggered an aggressive expansion of teams but seems to balk at the idea of aggressively expanding their volunteer base. Why?