WE'VE DONE IT!

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by lpickett

Not every school can afford to have a team.

Furthermore, even if every team could afford a team there simply isn't the infrastructure in place to handle it. The following is from a thought experiment I did a few years back assuming every school district in the state of Michigan had a team. Some minor things have changed (there were ~170 teams in MI last year, season changed to 7 weeks, and a few other minor things) but I think the overall conclusion is still the same.

I think it is great that we have as many teams as we do, I think that every student should have access to FRC. But we really need to realize that this isn't a simple problem to solve and there is no silver bullet.

There are 143 teams in Michigan now.

There are 549 school districts in Michigan, assume every district gets ONE team.

FiM events are capped at 40 teams to get the 12 matches.

Every team gets two events.

549 * 2 / 40 = 28 Events

There is a 6 week competition season.

Week 6 is reserved for the State Championship

That means 7 events per week (28/5 ~ 7)

That means FiM needs at least 8 fields (Backup field) Realistically it means more fields.

It takes 6 inspectors per event. This equates to 42 inspectors per week.

It takes 1 head ref, 1 LRI, 1 FTA, and 1 Judge Coordinator per event.

It takes 20-25 Judges per event. This equates to 158 judges per week

State Championship can hold 64-70 teams. This is 11% of the teams. To get the 50% number that is being shot for we need an event with over 250 teams. The World Championship in Atlanta has hovered around 380 for the last couple years. This is the equivalent of 4 State Championships.

MSC costs the most to put on of any FiM event.

Finding venues that can host an MSC type event is difficult and expensive.

MSC is currently space limited not match limited. Practice matches at MSC are optional as all teams have had 2 events already.

20% of Michigan teams attended the World Championship in Atlanta in 2010. 20% of 549 is 110 teams.

Possible Places to Hold Super Championship (3x - 4x size of current MSC)
Ford Field
Cobo Hall
Detroit Metro (In the hangars)
Private Industries?
Possibly old factories could be retrofit to be a combination build area, competition area, and training ground for students/ engineers.

Edit: For anyone who wants to run the numbers for each SCHOOL... there are 687 high schools in the state of Michigan. It really doesn't help the numbers at all...