In general, I have to admit that I think FIRST did a pretty good job of coming up with a way to limit qualify teams for the Championships. In fact, I actually suggested something very similar a couple of months ago:
Quote:
My thoughts on the Future of Nationals
Here are my thoughts:
1: The National tournament should be at Disney for as long as possible
2: Teams should have to qualify for the national tournament.
3: Teams should be able to qualify through a strong showing in any of the FRC’s main components (Regionals, Chairman’s Award, Animation, etc.)
4: There should be a lot of teams at the National Competition (250+)
Issues:
1: How to resolve the qualifying vs. planning issue?
a) Long break (2 months min.) between end of regionals and Nationals
b) Qualifying for 200N Nationals based on 200(N-1) performance (with a certain # of wildcards for top regional performers, Chairman’s Award finalists, Animation finalists, etc)
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Since FIRST stole my idea, I guess I'll post some comments and suggestions for improvements and hope that they steal those as well.
Anyway, here are my thoughts and suggestions about qualifying:
Since there are ten or fewer of the original teams left, I don't think it's useful to lobby for the removal of that exemption. It really doesn't make a big difference.
Chairmans award winners do deserve special treatment, but maybe a lifetime exemption is a little too much. I would suggest a 10 year exemption for all future Chairman's Award winners and a ten year exemption starting this year for the previous 10 winners of the award.
Normalizing points based on how many regionals a team has attended is not really an option. FIRST is clearly (I think) trying to emphasize the regionals. If anything, FIRST wants to encourage teams to attend multiple regionals (something that gets cheaper every time a new regional is added).
Qualification points should definitely be awarded at the 2002 Championship. In general, I would guess that teams that find themselves unable to attend the Championships this year will attend an extra regional, while the teams that can attend the Championships (espescially the pre-quals and the "Lucky" even # teams) will attend the Championships instead of an additional regional. If you think about it that way, the teams attending the Championships are actually worse off because the number of points available per team is much smaller.
I DO think that there should be more points available at the larger regionals. Give out one point to each of the teams in semi-finals and one point each to the teams that finish second and third in the Judging for the technical awards and Regional Chairman's Award.
Finally, there is the issue of what to do with spots taken by redundant qualifiers (ie multi-regional winners). The way I see it, there are two pools from which to fill these spots. First is the waitlist of even numbered teams (which I presume has already started). Second is the group of top regional performers that di not snare one of the auto qualifiers (regional finalists, runner up for quality etc.). I'm not sure how to do it, but I'd suggest trying to fill the spots from both pools.
P.J.