[nobrakes8]

I posted before, but I'm not sure if I mentioned or saw anybody mention Kansas City, MO.. They are the host of SkillsUSA's National Leadership and Skills Conference (about the same amount of people as FIRST and takes up a ton of room).. Bartle Hall is right across the street from the Marriot Downtown, Holiday inn, Double Tree, and I believe 1 more hotel like right on that street.

It might be good in Kansas City for a few reasons; first everybody pretty much has to travel because Kansas City is in a fairly remote FIRST area, so that means all the west coast and east coast teams and everybody in between would take a dent with paying for travel. This would give FIRST the opportunity to really shine in an area that lots of school districts don't have FIRST teams, give them a chance to recruit to get school administrators to visit, as well as all the advertising that would end up happening in the local news papers. Kansas City is another "cheap" big city everything was reasonably priced when I was there with SkillsUSA. The problem would be seating arrangements in the convention center setting.

My gut feeling tells me FIRST will be in Indianapolis, because the Northeast and Midwest are packed with so many teams, plus not to mention Indianapolis has to be fairly cheap compared to a lot of big cities on the east and west coast (NYC, LA, Boston, Washington DC are somewhat expensive places to visit for 3-4-5 days). My dad worked for Siemens VDO for 16 years and spent lots of time in Detroit and he said that was a really bad city. From what I understand about the city, if you think Atlanta underground was scary to walk around after 9-10pm, then Detroit is not the city you'd want to have host FIRST. Disney I just don't think has the resources to host this competition, sadly I don’t think Universal Studios does either, although I don't know if there’s anywhere else in the city capable of hosting the championship.

No matter what happens, this next contract will probably be fairly short because I think FIRST would like to hit every major area that has FIRST teams. I'm sure FIRST would love to eventually host the championship on the West Coast since Cali has the most teams and I'm pretty confident they would like to eventually return home to the New England area where everything started.