[jee7s]

A couple years back, a committee of a team reps was put together by FIRST in Texas to advise on the whole District transition. I was/am on that committee. While it didn't go very far, one of the things we considered was event locations. As part of that effort, I did a pretty exhaustive monte carlo style simulation to select event locations that minimized global team travel distance.

The result yielded two possible solutions:
1. Put all the events in the population centers. Teams in cities travel very little, teams outside cities travel a lot, but the global average distance is small.
2. Put events between population centers (like in Waco, College Station, etc). This caused everyone to drive a bit more but still resulted in a small average distance.

Of course, neither of those would address places like El Paso and the Valley.

Also, El Paso isn't just 6 teams and an airport. There was some interest that New Mexico would be part of the "Texas" District. In that scenario, El Paso and Lubbock would pull NM teams in and team counts there would rise substantially at those events.