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Unread 27-06-2016, 09:50
GreyingJay GreyingJay is offline
Robonut
AKA: Mr. Lam
FRC #2706 (Merge Robotics)
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Join Date: Mar 2015
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Location: Ottawa, Canada
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Re: Ontario Moving to District Model in 2017

Quote:
Originally Posted by Monochron View Post
Ontario is a special case. Typically the cost to single teams does not rise with the move to Districts, regardless of how many events a team attends. The issue in Ontario is the TDSB sponsorship, in which the money given for a team to attend their 2 District events is LESS than the money previously given for that team to attend one regional. Another way to look at this is as a loss of sponsorship, not purely an increase in cost brought on by going District. I think TDSB's change to give a portion of money for District events and a portion for DCMP was smart for the majority of teams, but there is a small minority who it will harm.
Yes, having spent some time digesting the last few pages of this discussion, I think the heart of it is the issue between Toronto area teams and the TDSB "sponsorship" they have been receiving. The upcoming change would be like any of us getting word from our sponsor that $1500 would be withheld until we qualified for district championship.

I have to pause here to say that my opinion here is purely my own and not representative of my team.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the fact that the barrier for entry has been so low for so many Toronto area teams. I love that as a result there are so many teams from the Toronto area and that FIRST and FRC are so prominent there. I love meeting students who are excited about FIRST and STEM.

But I have to agree with some of the sentiments posted on the last couple of pages. I'm sorry, but if an increase of $2500 is a show-stopper for your team, then you need to stop and think about how incredily lucky you have been.

We started from scratch this year - literally no money, no tools, no supplies - and we busted our patooties doing fundraisers and hitting the streets looking for sponsors. We targeted $20-40K when we made our preliminary budgets, and we hit our target. It was challenging, but we were rewarded. We found enough sponsors and donations to have a great year. And I'm certainly not patting ourselves on the back here - because thousands of other teams do the exact same thing each and every year.

I've been involved with a few FRC teams in the Ottawa region and we would love to see FRC grow in popularity here, but it's been slow going. It's hard to start new teams, and meanwhile older teams are leaving the program because they find it too difficult to sustain. For a long time I wondered how long it would take, how many teams it would take, before there was enough momentum here for FRC to catch on as big as it has in Toronto.

Now I understand that all your teams had a huge head start. And going forward you will have slightly less of one. While I understand that's disappointing, I hope you can see why I think it's unproductive to be grumbling about it.
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