Posted by Patrick Dingle at 04/09/2001 10:32 PM EST
Coach on team #639, Red B^2, from Ithaca High School and Cornell University.
In Reply to: Re: The size of Nationals in a few years!
Posted by Kieran on 04/09/2001 9:04 PM EST:
It happened this year... 335 team capacity out of 520+ teams. Given the fairly consistant growth percentage (about 140%/year) over the past 7 years, next year there will be 741 teams. In fact, here's the actual data and projections through 2010, using a relatively constant growth percentage of about 40%:
YEAR TEAMS PERCENT CHANGE
1992 28
1993 25 0.892857143
1994 44 1.76
1995 59 1.340909091
1996 93 1.576271186
1997 155 1.666666667
1998 199 1.283870968
1999 269 1.351758794
2000 373 1.3866171
2001 526 1.410187668
2002 741 1.408745247
2003 1043 1.407557355
2004 1468 1.407478428
2005 2066 1.407356948
2006 2907 1.407066796
2007 4090 1.406948744
2008 5754 1.406845966
2009 8094 1.406673618
2010 11385 1.40659748
Next year, if Disney does not boost capacity, less than half of FIRST teams will be allowed to attend nationals. If Disney wants to do it right, we'll need about 10 playing fields (depending on the game) and a pit station twice as big as this year
Now I know that this growth rate will not stay constant like this (there is not an unlimited number of sponsors out there), but we don't know when growth will slow. So in five years, Disney would have to support almost 3000 teams, or about 8 times as many as this year.
Patrick
: I was wondering in about 5 years when First gets too big and Epcot can't support all the teams where will it be hosted?