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Unread 01-07-2016, 22:21
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FRC #1197 (Torbots)
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Re: California District Proposal

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pauline Tasci View Post
I'm curious why people are under the impression we are not ready for this in the Southern Half of the state? Is it simply the lack of push on this forum exactly? The volunteers?
We have more teams in our half, with that we have potential for more volunteers.
Volunteers--but to be more specific, KEY volunteers. To be even more specific, key volunteers that have enough available time to work give-or-take double their current event load (because we'll need give-or-take double the number of events). There's ways to work with and around that, partly by some outside recruitment (MI did this early on, as I recall--not sure about any of the other district areas) and partly by interested parties jumping onboard now.

These numbers are specific to SoCal, BTW--I'm excluding NorCal from this due to lack of knowledge, though crossover between the two is probably desirable.
FTA: I think we could probably muster 2-3 FTAs currently, and good ones (and one of those has district experience already if he's available). Might be enough, for a couple years, which buys time to train more. There's always the "import" option as well, which is generally employed on Week 1 events as it is. 2017 will need a lot of FTAAs and some more FTAs stepping up.
LRI: That one is a bit easier. 3-4 currently, and several long-time inspectors that would have a pretty good chance to move up to LRI. I would suspect that this one would be the easiest of the key volunteers to fill. (In addition to the LRIs' habit of showing up at other events as inspectors anyway.)
Field Supervisor: I think we've got 4... get a few more trained, and that should be OK.
Head Ref: 1-2, maybe 3. Actually, reffing in general is a weak point. But with that few head refs, that's going to be very interesting. (I should also note that one of those typically only does one event.) This is a role that would be good to run some crossover SoCal to NorCal, and that does happen currently to at least some extent. That'd really help--unless NorCal is in the same situation.
Lead Queuer: I want to say there's 4, shouldn't be too hard to train more cat herders.

VCs and other "behind the scenes" key volunteers I'm not as familiar with. I will say that those folks tend to crop up--er, "be volunteered"?--pretty handily to my point of view, which is a bit limited on that.

Most of the other (read: non-key) roles are relatively easy to say "Hey, you with the volunteer paperwork! You're doing this" and have someone trained in the role day-of-event. Even inspectors and possibly refs have a decent chance at doing that, if it weren't for the required online training, if they've got rules knowledge. But the key volunteers have to be developed. Development takes time. For some things, I'm not sure 1 year is enough. (Head Refs are either a 2-event or a 2-year minimum as a ref except in exceptional circumstances--I forget just which. That's from FIRST's description, which I'm currently too lazy to go digging through the site for.)


Can that be solved? Sure. Potential volunteers for those roles--or for filling in any "promotion holes"--should be volunteering for 2017 regionals (and 2016 offseasons) in that role if it exists at that offseason. TBH, there's a reason that I volunteer, and that's part of it.

I would also go with the lack of push as being one other reason--part of that is that I would say that a lot of teams aren't on CD. The ones that are here tend to be more vocal for districts. Maybe there's a "silent majority" going on? Not sure which way it'd be going, at present--hard to know, with silent majorities. I know most of the mid-to-upper level teams that I've talked to on that are interested, at least in principle. Even some of the not-so-upper level teams, if conversation's gotten around that way.

tl;dr: The trained key volunteer positions need some more filling, which in some cases will be quick and in others will take a couple seasons. "Untrained" positions won't be an issue. And for whatever reason, I don't think the SoCal teams are being quite as vocal right now.
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