[EricH]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

As far as I am aware admission to The Championship Event has been and will continue to be free.

However, many teams and school districts consider that if you're not going to go to compete, you shouldn't go at all. Not all, but many. And it's not like the Championship has been within a few hours of NYC in the last 20 years--Orlando, Houston, Atlanta, St. Louis, St. Louis/Houston... It's hard enough to convince a district that you should go when you win your way there, imagine doing it without that win.

Originally Posted by FarmerJohn

After four years of not qualifying do you think I complained that my team was missing out from the "championship experience" because they weren't playing well enough? Of course not! We didn't need a championship to recognize the kids on our team and we sure didn't need one to inspire them. If you want to go to the championships then work harder, don't try and lessen the value of the championships by letting everyone in.

Calm down. THIS Championship is about inspiration. If you're going to complain about non-competitive teams going, you need to start complaining to HQ. HQ has, for better or worse, determined that all teams should at least have the chance to go every 4 years on average, and has set up their systems to allow/encourage that. If it was all about the most competitive team, they'd have kept it locked down at 400 teams and tightened the selection criteria. Back before my time, all you had to do was register and go! Then once every team had a regional in reasonable range, you had to do a regional before you could do the nationals, but every team could go. And then they had to trim it down even more, so if you didn't win your way in and you were an even team, you could go in even years (and same for odd teams in odd years). Then they had to cut the qualification even more--now they want to make sure that everybody has a chance to go every 4 years. That's an HQ decision.