California District Competitions

[PayneTrain]

I don't see any current benefit of changing the Hawaii makeup. It's a solid destination regional, and the number of teams there make up for a nice state championship atmosphere. California already has more teams than Michigan, why add on 36 more teams?

On the subject of the district system finally (hopefully) spreading across the United States, it's a subject people love to pick apart at the conclusion of the State Championship (and now MAR, I guess).

The district system isn't this scary entity that threatened the sanctity of FIRST like most people (including myself) believed in its infancy. Like how South Carolina picks presidents, the Michigan State Championship picks Einstein competitors. What once was a pilot program has seem to become FIRST's idea of how to fix the degrading regional system we have in place.

Regionals made since in 2000. Michigan, California, and Texas had one competition each. If you wanted to go chill in Epcot and you had the money, you got to go and compete in the tents. If you were based out of Virginia and points North, you had options for multiple regionals.

Now it's 2012. We've gone from a collective of under 400 to a growing monolith of what, 2400? And championships haven't really grown much in the last few years because it simply cannot. It's a problem that needs to be solved, and the district model works. Now, the qualification structure doesn't always fit the region, nor does the seat count. However, I feel that you can scale it to any region of the country containing two or three close regionals.

I don't know if FIRST is going to sanction its spread, or more easily enable it, but it's coming. It's coming to New England, California, the Southeast, the Ohio Valley, greater metropolitan DC, the deep south, the upper and lower midwest, Texas...

I'm excited.