My team has been competing for seven FRC seasons. We started the same year as the St. Louis Regional, and have competed there every year.
We recognized early on that a second (or third) event each year helps to build the team by giving our students more playing time and exposing them to a wider variety of competitors. And road trips are fun.
We've been to the Championship twice, in 2003 and 2005. We've been to road regionals five times: Midwest in 2004, Buckeye in 2005, Waterloo in 2006, and Boilermaker in 2007-2008. And we've been to IRI in 2006-2007.
Our team has enjoyed road regionals more than Championships, mainly because road regionals offer more matches and the same exposure to variety*, for less cost and easier travel. I'm sure we'll want to go back to the Championship some year, though.
And as I've said before, I should have gone to IRI years ago. It has been a blast the past two years, and we'd love to go back again.
---------------
* the Championship has the potential to offer much greater variety, but its logistics and venue make that potential difficult to realize.
__________________
Richard Wallace
Mentor since 2011 for FRC 3620 Average Joes (St. Joseph, Michigan)
Mentor 2002-10 for FRC 931 Perpetual Chaos (St. Louis, Missouri)
since 2003
I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
(Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97)