It's not quite as bad as all that.
Although growth is down by maybe half under last year, certainly due to economic reasons.
We (Team 358) did chose WPI over DC because it's so much cheaper for us, so Glenn must be seeing similar fallout.
Registration (1501) is currently ahead of last year at this same time by about 8%, or you can think of it as being 10 days ahead of last year. Most of the gain over last year is actually due to veteran teams returning, rather than rookies.
I'll add the list of missing teams as an attachment to this post around lunchtime when I'll have some time away from work. I don't want to inadvertantly, through no fault of my own, qualify for the Autodesk signup...
Attached (now) is the list of 357 missing teams that played last year.
Based on one past report at this time, there are probably another ~30 teams that registered, but don't yet show up on the full list of teams.
Some, such as 10 Long Island teams, are just invisible because they are sitting on our local regional waitlist.
Of course other teams, e.g., Israel, are traditionally late in registering. Teams 47 and 65 are only there because they merged into a new team.
Here's what the
chart looks like so far...