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Originally Posted by artdutra04
Look at your local high school sports teams. Chances are if they have team sponsors, it's places like Joe's Service Station or Hometown Bank for amounts like $250 or $500. You don't see Nike or Adidas or Reebok sponsoring high school sports teams for $5k, $10k or $20k+ each. Why? Because there are just so many of them - it wouldn't be economically feasible.
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Actually if you talk with a lot of schools the way they fund their sports programs is through ticket sales at their more popular sports (basketball and football typically). The budget is way bigger than most FRC teams. Think about the local football game. I was at a small school and tickets were $2 but there were at least 2000 people in the stands Friday night. They would get 5 home football games a season to rake in about $20k in tickets sales and this is for a school that only graduates 100 people a year. The $250-$500 donations are typically more in line with Little League where I am from (and I am from small town/small budget America). At some of these big HS, they must make a mint at a Friday Night game.
In the past 5 years we have done a lot of local regionals (GLR and Detroit are within 1 hour drive). The great thing about those are that the parents are able to come and support their kids at those events. When we go 2.5 to 4 hours away, only a dedicated few are able to arrive and support their children. These regionals have between 30 and 60 teams that I have been too. While the 60 team GLR is a sight to behold. Our students usually prefer West Michigan beacues it is slightly smaller, but electric with a full crowd.
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We will see how this turns out. My hope this that this works out well and that FIRST will end up adopting a structure that has district events and then 35 "Regionals Championships", and the state lines dissappear again. Since this is a pilot, it is like any other Pilot. Some rules and formatting are for testing, some rules and formatting are there to limit the possible negative effects should it go bad. The "State" limitation I hope is only to limit the pilot to a specific subset of FIRST. This allows for a large enough sample to see how it will work out with out risking FRC for the Majority.
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M.Krass, thank you for noting specific examples of quality differences. To be honest I noticed something was a little different, but couldn't put my finger on it. Overall though it was a really cool event (Malt1881-Thank you and the rest of the crew for a great event). I think this may be one of those examples of the 80/20 development rule that for 50% of the time an resource, you can have an 80% solution. You have to at least double your efforts (time, money, people...) in order to achieve that high level of polish. This rule holds true to many systems throughout the world. The question comes down to whether or not 80% is the best solution. Kelly Johnson of Lockeed Martin stressed this aspect in many of their development projects. Being in the auto-industry, and 80% car will get you at the bottom of every Consumer Report.
I have only been to a few off season events. I have enjoyed every one I have been to, but some more than others. I for one am very excited to give this a try.