[EricH]

Originally Posted by Ed Law

Let's not jump to conclusions. I am sure they have good reasons. May be they believe sponsors prefer flashy regionals, or they get better press coverages when they are not at a crowded high school gym. Who knows. It is best to sit down and talk about it and hope the leaders will do what is best for most CA teams. It will never make everybody happy. Good leaders will do what is best for majority of current teams and the future of the program.

I've heard one or two of the reasons. Here's a sample:

When MI went district, a then 2nd-year team got kicked out of the only event they'd called home (GLR). They landed in L.A. that year--it would NOT repeat NOT be the same without them now. Particularly since they've started bringing friends with them, every year. With the rapidly decreasing numbers of regionals available to attend (and the rapidly decreasing available capacity of those regionals due to everybody wanting to go there), where are those teams going to go for their home event if CA goes district? There are no regionals on their entire continent!

Short version: We like visitors!

Counter-argument: With the lack of space in current regionals, it won't be long before there won't be any visitors anyway!

Spoiler for commentary:

When you need to put two more regionals just to take pressure off of existing ones and you can only put in one, it doesn't help much. I can count on one hand the international teams I saw in SoCal this year, and on the other I can count the out-of-state teams. (I was at all four events. I saw every team at least once. That's 200 slots, and maybe 10 teams were from outside both zones. 5%. I saw a lot of teams twice and I know more went farther away for their second--or third--event.)

And I've heard the "they like the big events" and the "they like the show" arguments too, but from different people. "They" referring not to the sponsors, but to the teams. To which the only appropriate response is to figure out how many teams actually want to go district...