Quote:
Originally Posted by Hot_Copper_Frog
I think that people are assuming that having a small but incredibly elite cohort of teams is what makes Michigan successful, but I have to disagree. The district system may have "watered down" competitions in the sense that the most competitive teams are no longer playing together at every event, but it allows a large number of teams to play with and learn from them.
Is it more effective to have the top 10 teams at one district, or to have each of those teams at a different district? If you spread them out, younger and more inexperienced teams have the opportunity to interact with powerhouse teams and learn from them. While it might be more exciting to witness a bunch of them gathered at one competition, it's really not helping teams improve.
Rising tides lift all boats. If we work together to support our low resource and newer teams, we will create a stronger FIRST community as a whole.
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I 100% agree with you, maybe my post doesn't necessarily reflect that the way I wanted it to.
Having few districts with more concentrated teams benefited those teams and helped them get to a level before MSC that was a significant advantage over the rest of the world.
I think what has helped teams the most is how often newer teams are getting to run their own alliances in events where it never happened before. The biggest way to learn how to compete in eliminations is to actually get a chance to do it. We saw this pay off big time at MSC with all of the new teams that captained alliances in elims.