Quote:
Originally Posted by EricH
The next weekend's competition is 3 hours away, requiring an overnight stay, and suddenly you find out that 2 of the team members can't go because their parents don't want them to, another one has a medical emergency, three can't pay, and of the rest at least one has a commitment that he can't get out of that lands right during travel. Oh, and you find this out right before you MUST choose. Which do you choose, with THAT information?
If you don't see my point, I'll put it plain and simple: Districts are not for everyone. More to the point, many people in places without districts do not see the value in districts, and do not want districts.
It's great that all y'all in districts want everybody else to be in districts. Just one thing:
GIT YER RHETORIC OFFA MY LAWN! For whatever reason, it seems like y'all are just about going militant to get everybody else to go along with your view. COOL IT. Something you may not know is that if someone is rather entrenched in a viewpoint, incorrect or not, it's worse than useless to try to hammer them over the head with the correct one until they concede! They may acknowledge to themselves that you're right, but darned if they don't want to even look like they're being forced into admitting it, and they'll resist. I'll be honest, seems like half the time when I look here, somebody else has said the exact same thing: Gotta go district, gotta go district.
Ya catch my drift?
Andrew, some folks--I name no names, but I'm not necessarily one of them--figure that you get more inspired if teams from outside the area come to you. You can't do that in a district (outside of interdistrict play, which if I'm not mistaken I can still count the totals without taking my shoes and socks off). Out where I'm at, if we didn't have one of the biggest regionals in FRC, we wouldn't be able to think about having that!
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Actually the fact that on any given weekend during competition season someone can get sick or have some commitment that they can't get out of is one of the biggest pluses to the district system to teams that are one and done in the Regional system.
I spent 5 seasons in the Regional system on a team that attended 2 events. I do not believe that every student attended both events during that time. Yes some times it was because the parent wouldn't allow the student travel the ~3hrs to the next closest event. However there were also students that were unable to attend the event that was only ~1hr away. Going to 2 events meant that a much larger number of students were able to attend at least one event. Now under the District system that same team has 2 events that are under 1/2 hr away. Some of those students that couldn't attend the travel event did so because their commitment or illness really only prevented them from attend part of the event and it was prohibitive to make the long travel for a single day.
Now certainly that situation does not apply to all teams. For some it does mean that their second event is 2, 3, 4 or more hrs away than their closest event. However the fact remains that for almost all of the teams there is now an event that is a similar or shorter distance than before.