Quote:
Originally Posted by NorviewsVeteran
It looks like Virginia will have a district system for FTC for fall '09. Maybe the FRC will follow suit soon.
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[soapbox]
No offense, but it makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE for Virginia to have a district system. There is simply no need.
In 2009, the state of Virginia had 59 teams registered for FRC. The NASA/VCU regional alone has hosted as many as 66 teams. That's not even counting the Washington DC and Chesapeake regionals (which can also host >60 teams), both of which are within very easy traveling distance for the largest portion of VA teams (Northern VA). Most NoVa teams don't even need hotels for the DC regional (just like RVA teams don't need hotels for VCU).
The logical choice for venue to host the state Championship is the Siegel Center (current venue for the VCU regional). The max capacity of the venue is greater than number of teams in Virginia, so literally EVERY team would qualify. The districts are then nothing more than practice events and qualifiers for the Chairman's award. The actual robot competitions would be completely meaningless.
With ~60 teams, you only need 3 districts (assuming 40 teams per) to get the 120 needed competition slots. If you hit the 61+ mark, you're bumped up to four (but have a very large number of "open slots" for 3+ district teams).
Where do you put the districts? Two are probably in NoVa. One is in/around Richmond. And one is somewhere in Southwest VA (Roanoke, Lynchburg, etc). Travel costs are ultimately not cut for anyone, as the NoVa teams already have the DC regional and the Richmond and Southwest VA teams now have to travel to their second district.
You might be able to fudge around with it a bit and move the Richmond district to Charlottesville and one of the NoVa districts to Southeast (Norfolk/Va Beach) Virginia. But then the Richmond teams suddenly have an even larger travel bill to foot (and they currently don't have any at all if they don't goto a 2nd event).
Beyond that, a number of NoVa teams routinely travel to the Chesapeake Regional (and now the DC regional), often skipping VCU entirely. This now makes it much more expensive for them to do that, as they essentially committed to a Virginia event (and likely the State Championship at VCU as well). And what about the North Carolina teams?
You could make a slightly more persuasive argument if you say include Maryland, DC, and North Carolina as well. You then jump from 59 teams to 111 teams in the region. The Championship event, regardless of which of the three venues, will then hold approximately 55-60% of the capacity, a much more reasonable number.
You then have 222 needed competition slots, or 6 districts (with 18 slots left over for 3rd events, assuming no more than 9 new teams are formed in this area). Placement then becomes even more tricky, with too few North Carolina teams (11) to truly mandate a district in NC (raising their travel costs) and almost all of the team density focused around the Washington DC area.
More importantly, this would "close off" three regionals that have traditionally had a good deal of out-of-state support, and flourished because of it.
Chesapeake had 26 teams, or 47% of it's attendees, from outside this proposed area (mostly from NJ, MA, NY, and NH).
DC had 17 teams, or 26% of it's attendees, from outside this area. Even more importantly are WHICH teams those were. 45, 234, 365, 118, 538, 1279 and others were instrumental in making DC the high quality regional it was. Five of those teams were in the finals, and 234 won the Chairman's Award. These were among the most gracious and outgoing teams at the event (especially 234 and 365), and helped many in "rookie row" make it out onto the field.
Even VCU, which has a smaller portion of out of state teams, has very significant impacts from those who do come from out of state. What would the regional be without appearances from teams like 383 (Brazil), 843 (Canada), 359 (Hawai'i), etc?
Beyond that, I honestly feel that VCU is the best regional out there, and is certainly the best I've been to (VCU, DC, Philadelphia, Chesapeake, New Jersey, Colorado, New York). There's a reason why some of these teams make return ventures (this was the 4th time 843 has ventured down from Ontario if memory serves). It's a terrific event, and I wouldn't want to do anything that could possibly harm it.
Too Long, Didn't Read:
Bottom line, it doesn't make sense to implement the district system in Virginia currently. The team distribution just isn't right, nor is their the appropriate quantity. Even if combined with Md, NC, and DC it still would be very flawed. There are some very definite advantages to it, but those don't automatically require the district system as a whole.
Please read, consider, and discuss individual features of the district system
here. You might be surprised to see that some of them might not need entire overhauls.
[/soapbox]