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Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
I have two points to make. First, expanding FIRST to every high school in America would be a incredibly massive undertaking. There's on the order of 30,000 high schools in the US. Let's assume $10K per team and $125K per regional and 45 teams per regional. We'll assume 15 weeks of regionals (triple the current 5 weeks) We then have:
$300 million in sponsorships to teams.
$83 million in sponsorships to regionals.
667 regionals in a year.
45 regionals a weekend, and thus 45 fields, trucks, and sets of event staff.
Not to mention the production and distribution of 30,000 kits a year. I can't easily estimate the dollar value of parts donations and discounts this would represent.
This is assuming teams only attend one regional, as well, and attend only a nearby regional. With almost a regional every weekend in every state, I think that's a safe assumption. That said, I think it's safe to say that FIRST could not expand to every high school in the US in its current form. Overhead costs and organizational challenges would be very difficult to manage. Not to mention finding that much sponsorship. And note that doubling or tripling the size of a regional would only somewhat mitigate this effect. I beleive that to expand this much, FIRST would have to change to some sort of rolling, year round competition or have groups of teams put on their own regionals or something. It would definitely need a radical organizational shift to achieve this.
My second point. Does FIRST really need to be in every high school in America? It would certainly not be a good fit for some high schools like those that focus on arts or other things that don't really work with FIRST. Some of these high schools are small rural high schools where a team would comprise a large percentage of the student body. I'm sure there are other reasons here as well. I don't think FIRST really needs to extend to every high school to achieve its goal of changing the culture of the US to focus less on sports heroes, etc. I think, patently, it needs to reach a significant enough fraction of America's youth in order to achieve this. A presence in every high school in America is not necessarily vital to this.
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I think FIRST SHOULDN'T be in every school IMHO, but why not aim for the moon? If you fail, you'll land among the stars.
I think more and more non-schools will get involved in the program, more and more teams that have money to use from the government or from individuals that could be spent on more video games or something like that, but instead on FIRST.