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Originally Posted by nobrakes8
LA, NYC, Chicago (even Indianapolis and baltimore) are already heavily actvie FIRST areas. In these areas its almost as if FIRST is becomeing too popular with too many teams and not enough sources of funding.
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However with the hype of FIRST in the area it may prompt a lot of school districts to look at the comepition and see how big FIRST really is, and essentally may hurt other Indiana teams with more compeition for sponsors, resources, mentors, etc..
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Well, you do raise a good point there. To that end, a place like Kansas City or even Omaha (there are no registered Nebraska teams, last I checked) would be ideal. However...
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Originally Posted by Ben Lauer
I don't think this will happen. I believe that it might spark new teams to start, but when the local business in the downtown areas see the amount of people that this attracts, and the coverage it is able to obtain, I think there is a better chance of companies supporting the struggling teams. I don't think the concentration of teams should be a high priority when choosing a venue. I believe that there should be some in the area to help raise awareness and find attention, but the number of teams is not a strict requirement.
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I'm more inclined to agree with Ben. Obtaining sponsorship is quite difficult. Most of my team's sponsors this year were extremely local businesses (either in one of the two towns served by our high school). If there were large corporate sponsors it was because mentors on the team worked for these companies. I don't think we had a single corporate sponsor outside of the Worcester suburban area. (That includes large companies like Rohm and Haas, Raytheon, and National Grid -- the reason we were able to get sponsorship from these heavy hitters was because they have facilities in the Boston/Worcester area, already sponsor other FIRST teams, and had our mentors working in their facilities.)
To perhaps support your original point, local businesses don't traditionally have as much money to spend on charitable giving than large corporations. It was difficult to get monetary sponsorship. A few of our local sponsors contributed their products -- a Northborough print shop donated the labor involved in printing our team shirts, a Southborough bakery donated muffins and coffee for our Saturday morning meetings -- things like that.
On the other hand, the unfortunate truth is that businesses need to be approached. Bo the CFO is not going to wake up one morning and say, "I think the Conglom-O Corporation should sponsor a FIRST robotics team!" Sponsorship is obtained through cold calling, student involvement, and mentors approaching the people holding the purse strings at their places of employment.
That in mind, I doubt that having a Championship Event in any given city will benefit all but the most local of teams. You might get some suburban team benefit (towns around the city such as Carmel, Lawrence, and others -- it's been a few years since I was in Indy, but I almost took a job there so I was looking for apartments in its suburbs), but I doubt highly that having the Championship Event in Indianapolis will result in every Indiana business scrambling for a local team to sponsor. Furthermore, I don't think teams obtaining sponshorship will have any more difficult of a time doing so than they already do. Finding money is going to be a hard and undesirable (but necessary) job no matter what.