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Originally Posted by Andy Grady
Hello everyone!
Yeah, I know, I forgot to do the question last week, but I'm still relearning to get back into the swing of this. Anyhow, with Battlecry and IRI looming on the horizon, I figure this weeks question would revolve around offseasons...
Question of the Week (6/14/04):
Do you feel that your region of the country has become overly saturated with offseason competitions, or do you feel your area needs more?
Once again, all suggestions for Questions of the Week are welcome. Contact me through PM, E-mail (skrach42@aol.com), or AIM (QuietRiverRage1) if there is a question you would like to see posted.
Have fun!
-Andy Grady
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Actually, I do believe that in the Mid-Atlantic region, there has become an over saturation of off-season competitions. There are easily 10+ events in PA, DE, NJ, and there simply aren’t enough teams to support this number of events. I believe that 222 hosted the first event in our area, and since then, other teams have experienced 222's event (PARC), or another off-season comp, and figured that it would be fun to do, or would be a good fundraiser, but in my opinion, the explosion of events in the last 3 years has really been a negative. I know that on our team (MOE 365) we have numerous projects that we try to work on over the summer and during the fall, and we simply don’t have the time to go to all of the events, as that would just be asking too much of the students and mentors in addition to everything else that we do. Also, by the time our robot is done with the official season, its pretty beat, and all of the components are extremely worn. It seams like every year at PARC (the first off-season comp we go to), the robot suffers some kind of catastrophic breakdown due to the wear and tear of the season. The breakdown is fine, but the massive time commitment it would take to keep the robot running through all of the demos that we do AND 10 off-season competitions would be simply too much.
I think that fewer off-season comps would be much more manageable for the teams and our area, and teams’ participation in events have shown this. Host teams are beginning to have trouble filling events, and others are having difficulty deciding which to go to. It is possible that after this great growth period in the past 2-3 seasons, there will be a collapse in the number of off-season comps around our area because many events will be operating below capacity, and thus in the red financially. I hope this doesn’t happen, but I fear that it will. Time will tell. Sorry if this came out choppy, but I just had a lot of ideas that I wanted to fit in this post.
But, then again, that's just my $.02.