[topgun]

I am surprised that no one has mentioned expanding the size of the field and the length of the tournament.

A lot of the current MSHSL tournaments (football, basketball, etc) starts out with every team in them. They play elimination games eventually getting to the "state" tournament. Usually they are single elimination games, you win you move on. The sport's state tournament will be a three or four day event. Right now in robotics you play one event and only the top few from each event are going on to the next play.

What is the restriction on making the Robotics tournament a two day event or even a three day event? People and schools have no qualms about pulling their kids out of school for 3 days for a basketball tournament. Would it hurt to expand the tournament to two days? We could even play Saturday/Sunday if people are concerned about volunteers missing work.

Idea for the future: Right now the MSHSL tournament results do not determine who goes to champs, so we could afford to have an elongated tournament season after Championships (would actually be good practice to see what a district model would look like). You could do 4 geographically-oriented regional tournaments with 52 teams in each. Top 60 teams with the highest OPR go on to the State finals for two or three days of robot nirvana.

I think there are options on how we work to get truly the best robots in attendance at the state tournament, and ultimately get more playing time for all of the teams.

One of the problems the RPC has in expanding to districts and more playing time for teams is the lack of volunteers. We need more trained volunteers so the same people aren't doing every tournament every weekend.

Also, I don't think CA teams should qualify for a state tournament that emphasizes robot performance. They are targeting a different award. Some teams do both well (eg. 2052) but I feel the State tournament should be about robot performance.