[EHaskins]

I think the year alone is the simplist to understand. If you're concerned about adding FLL/FTC/JFLL then you could prefix the year with the competition (i.e. FRC2010, FLL2007, etc.). As for FTC and FLL which span the new year, use the date of kickoff.

You could also make the competiton and year/game different fields. That would allow you to easily query for the FLL/FTC/FRC competitions/matches which happened the same year, assuming you had that data in the system.

Another thought, if you intend to add FLL data you may want to reconsider using competiton short codes internally, since the FLL events are both more numerous and also change from year to year meaning that there isn't a universal shorthand like in FRC.