[archiver]

Posted by Splash.

Student on team #53, Team Inferno, from Eleanor Roosevelt High School and NASA GSFC.

Posted on 8/23/2000 5:14 PM MST



: I am pretty sure that my hat is safe on this one:
: I will eat my hat if FIRST will ever goes to a water based field.
: Joe J.
: P.S. All bets are off if FIRST forms that pro-league I am always lobbying for ;-) Although I wouldn't mind eating hat stew every now and again if it helped bring about a pro FIRST league.


I started thinking about 'what if FIRST had a pro-league.' I can see good reasons for it, but mostly bad ones. Having a pro league would make it easier to show more matches on ESPN. All the times I've seen it on tv, the featured matches had 3 (97 & 98) great teams. With a league of say 100 of the top teams, many more matches could be shown, not to mention top teams like Chief Delphi and HotBot would not be so 'unbeatable.' Also having a pro league would give teams incentive to work hard. Earning your way into the big-leagues is how most professional sports do it.

Now the bad things. If there were only 100 top teams, it would be hard to decide who gets in. Some teams would be snuffed. Another problem is that having a pro-league that you have to earn your way into would encourage less student involvement. While there are some great student-only teams, most of the schools that get little to no engineering support, would not be included in this league. By the time a group of studnets at a high school had enough experience to build a professional robot, they would be graduating, and the next group of students would not be ready for the pros. And a lot of teams will say they have a lot of student involvement. Putting the pieces together does not count as student building in my opinion and watching the robot be built does not count in my opinion. I'm not trying to bash the teams where the engineers do all the work, they have great robots and they make FIRST better. But my point is that schools that do not have engineering support would be forced into competition with other amateur robots, and not get the exposure to some of the great robots that the engineers build. And the my last reason in opposition to the pro-league, is that the amateur league would not be as fun. Even having just one great robot and 3 bad ones in a match is more of a thrill than 4 equally matched robots. The depth of alliance selections would be slim and the elimination rounds would go as expected, higher seed always winning.

Just my thoughts, I see how a professional league could be beneficial to FIRST, but I also see how it could make teams more prone to dropping out.