Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan Petrovic
Another, under-appreciated benefit to district events: With 12 qualifying matches being played instead of ~8, it's more likely that the most deserving teams will be in picking positions. A larger sample size will help ensure that the best teams end in their rightful position.
With the exponential growth of FIRST in Minnesota, I would be surprised to see them stick with regionals for much longer.
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While I agree that having the 12 matches is great for getting better ranking results, one important thing to keep in mind is that playing 12 matches played over ~1.5 days with 40 teams is usually a much more grueling pace than teams that attend regionals are used to. I think the biggest break in scheduled matches we had this year was like 30 minutes (any longer was due to field issues) but most matches we played were within less than 10 minutes of each other making robot maintenance much more problematic if you have any major issues.
Not sure if anyone here can speak to this, but does anyone know if MN plans to still have scheduled practice matches like regionals do (curious due to the last part of the 3rd paragraph)? One of the things I liked about how practice matches are handled in FiM events it's all first-come first-serve, so if you have a robot that's ready to go, you can get back into the end of the queue and keep practicing, and if you're a team that's robot isn't ready right when practice matches start, you can still squeeze a few in at the end of the night without worrying about missing scheduled practices.