[waialua359]

Originally Posted by rwodonnell

I think it's curious that they boxed themselves in a little by declaring that it would be based on geography in the original announcement. I'm not sure how other teams would react to this, but I think our team would welcome a "division 2" sort of experience until we were strong enough to graduate to the "division 1" field.

This sort of breakdown (by team strength if you will) would solve the obvious problems of "who are the world champions" (div 1 winner) and "dang we probably won't ever see 1114 and 254 together at champs again".

I would wait until the official announcement is released on how they plan to split up the teams for the 2 events.
For many, the decision to not want to go to the other one instead, will be primarily based on finances/logistics rather than the teams they want to compete with.
If the event is 45 minutes away from my hometown, I cant why any team or school district would allow travel to the other champs due to cost.
After speaking with many teams this past weekend, this seems to be the primary issue for them which makes sense.

For our team, cost to go to Houston is much cheaper than flying to St. Louis. But given the chance, we will choose St. Louis and Detroit the following year, because we do VEX. If we have teams qualifying for VEX Worlds, we would elect to skip Houston since its planned for the same weekend.