Quote:
Originally Posted by rpaulsen
Suffern is a lot closer than you may think, especially for teams from Uptown or the Bronx. There are two ways to get there, either by crossing the GWB or Tappen Zee, and each way it is only about 45 minutes of travel in each direction. Last year I brought my team down from New Rochelle to Long Island, an identical distance to Suffern, and we took the bus back and forth each day. Sure it was a little tiring, but it was fine. We skipped load in on Wednesday night, only brought our pit crew on Thursday, and bused the Friday/Saturday.
I expect that we will start seeing a bit of a split in the NYC area teams, where uptown/Bronx teams start favoring HVRA and downtown/Brooklyn/Queens/SI favoring Long Island. Realistically, we probably would need at least one more area event in either Suffolk or Brooklyn to make this area work best in a District model.
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With all due respect, look at the attendance rate of the HudsonValleyRally offseason event. Not every team has access to a parent with a car or a mentor with a car (for example our team has access to a car through our Lead Mentor who is a dean of the school and through a fellow mentor, both of which work in jobs that require them to be on call at all times. I imagine given the attendance rates of this event and the event in 2010, other teams share the same struggles. To be clear, if an event cannot be accessed by public transportation (MTA trains to Javits for example), many NYC teams would not attend.
I've been on the most well funded team in NYC before joining the team I'm helping now and the dynamic is strikingly different. Everything that seems like a nonissue to a medium-well funded team is a huge issue for low resource teams.
I completely agree that we need more events in the 5 boroughs. HVR is the right step towards districts, but inner city teams are being completely ignored at this point.