Quote:
Originally Posted by Bluman56
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.
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Look, I totally get it. And from my post, you can see that I suggesting that in order to get districts up and running we need a new event in either Queens or Brooklyn. St. John's and Queens College would both be excellent options as Sam mentioned. NYC needs to move to the District model explicitly because we have so many under funded teams who deserve to have the opportunity to compete more than once. The only problem is we need to get our number of events and most importantly our number of volunteers up to make this happen.
Imagine how hard things would have been this year if the other the Hudson Valley coaches and I, our team volunteers, and the NYCFIRST staff didn't work as hard as we did over the last two years creating the Hudson Valley Robotics Association and this new Regional event. We might have very well been in the same situation with NYC moving to the Armory and TVR/FLR falling on the same days. Honestly, I for one am excited for what ending the NYC Regional at Javits because it was the single biggest impediment to moving to Districts. Now we can focus all of that money and energy into a series of smaller much more affordable events, turning FRC into a true season rather than a one off-all or nothing event.