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Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
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.
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That would be the general concept. You could decide to throw in DE as well. I'm not sure how you figure this would be a detriment to the NC teams, though. They could choose to go to one event with the same travel costs as they have today (likely less, one less night lodging), and play more games. And it would be a great incentive to increase the number of teams in NC, a state which is very underrepresented at present. They should be able to field not just one district, but 2 or 3 based on population.
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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?
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And that's the biggest detriment to any district system. If cross-border trades could be arranged it would help tremendously. That wasn't a part of the MI Pilot, but could be added to the district model later. It becomes more important when we consider this possible Capitol area is immediately adjacent to Philadelphia. Other areas that would require cross-border team trades would be around St Louis and Kansas City, both of which sit on the edge of MO. (Presumably KC would be in the middle of some South-Central area, but there are IL teams that would be cut off from St. Louis.) Michigan lost contact with teams in the Toledo area who traditionally came to GLR and/or Detroit because they were the closest regionals.
Once we figure out what the future will be, we need to figure out a name for these things. District/Area? District/Sectional? State Championship worked for MI, but won't work for multi-state areas.