[ColleenShaver]

This was a hot topic at the NH Forum as well. I have to agree with what seemed to be the unanimous consensus of our group: you can't limit participation in Nationals.

At it's base perspective, it's not within the mission of FIRST to 'limit' any one from doing anything, but rather the complete opposite.

Plus, a major problem with making it eliminatory is for making reservations. If teams didn't know until March that they needed to make it to Nationals for April, costs of airfare alone would skyrocket.

Some answers were that Disney can expand- that parking lot is MUCH bigger than we use. It seemed that FIRST and Disney had come to terms with the fact that anymore than the 320ish would be too much. FIRST can't really staff any more fields and the cost of those fields is probably through the roof for Disney.

So like i said in the post on the GenForum: it was suggested that there be multiple 'nationals' or 'pre-nationals'... one for each coast. Then FIRST can pay (or yes, teams could pay) for the winners only to attend a 'final match' somewhere (Hey- maybe we should start going back to the White House with the winners.. they have a nice lawn to setup a field on ;-))

In any case- I think once regionals get expanded more and get to be the 'focus' of the competition, nationals can be eliminatory and downsized for Disney (back to the 70 or so teams and bring it back inside the parks... who remembers 1995-1996??).. thus reducing costs across the board. Then Nationals could prolly occur later in the year (june-ish?) when it's more convienent for Disney.

Just ideas... but I don't think limiting is ready to happen yet.