Quote:
Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
Ego and talent are awesome, but if your 501c(3) decides to invest money in areas other than production/venue selection, it's a moot point. Unless you're purely talking about the on-field robot performance creating the spectacle?
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As far as I am aware, the reason you have and will likely continue to see higher quality production at the NE, PNW, and Chesapeake championships are because it is something that the powers that be can prioritize without having to make a trade-off they would deem unfavorable. As long as Lehigh is free and not other comparable or better venue is free in MAR, MAR will continue to get the CMP it gets. FiM won't tell you this themselves but if it wasn't considered a safety hazard, the FTAs would probably be transporting the fields across the state via a series of rickshaws just to save money. The switch to districts in Michigan and the Mid-Atlantic were not ones made primarily out of a desire to evolve and grow the region, but an imperative to keep the regions financially solvent in the short and long term. NE, PNW, and Chesapeake did not have an evolve or die mandate that MAR and FiM had.
PCH, NC, and Indiana each historically had one regional to their name (the 1 year stopgaps of the Crossroads Regional and the other Georgia event excluded). The model those three operate on for all intents and purposes are taking the money the old RPC could raise and are putting it across 5ish events of the same quality while trying to get favorable deals with venues and figure out parts of their states where they can get more investment into the program locally and in turn, statewide. In all seriousness, there are merits to an argument that small single-state districts are in the short term a very tenuous deal for teams and will require a lot of right moves on the chessboards to get bigger payoffs. An observation worth noting is that ISC had a very small chance to not actually award any points-based slots this year outside of the finalist captain and first pick. I think they got 1 more.
NE, PNW, and Chesapeake all are folding in 3+ very long standing and large regionals into one system (for NE, it was what, 5?) so it is probably fair to compare a potential California district system to these systems. While it is definitely true to say this for regionals, not all district systems are created equal either, it just so happens that environmental factors (venue availability, available funding sources) have a smaller impact when you have already torn down the barriers of massive financial overheads and limited roster spots at events.