New District Events for 2013?

[Jeff Pahl]

Originally Posted by BigJ

I can see MN going to district, although I don't know what the geographic spread of teams looks like in the state.

Yeah, it would stink. Double if WI and Midwest are same week again, or consecutive weeks like many other times!

Let me preface my comments by stating I do NOT have any inside information on what may be happening in MN. These are my thoughts and ramblings only!! And I'm not awake enough yet this morning for this to be worth a whole $0.02, so consider this my $0.015 worth.

I can see us going district in a couple years, too. 2014 seems like a possibility. We need another regional first just to get more of a volunteer base trained.

The geographic spread of teams in the state is pretty even, except for the northwest portion of the state.

With 150ish teams and growing, we have the teams necessary, or will soon.

My gut preference would be to include the North Dakota teams, and at least northern Iowa and western Wisconsin, if not all of those states. I know the ND teams would hate to have to go back to driving through MN to get to an event.

If we included all of those states in a big district model, then the Milwaukee teams could still go to Midwest if they wanted to as an out-of-district event. There is already good team growth in the LaCrosse area, a district event there would spur even more, and draw teams from southern MN too. An event in Madison would help spur growth in an area that should have more teams than it does, and would draw from both Milwaukee and the western WI / southeast MN area.

We have to do something in MN. The three 60+ team regionals we had this year were too big, too hard on the volunteers, the venues are getting too crowded, and it's just not fair to the teams to ask them to compete against 60 other teams for a chance to win a spot at CMP when there are other regionals with only 40ish teams. If we grow to 175 teams next year it gets even worse. Adding one regional next year and going to ~50 teams per event doesn't really add any spots for new teams, we had about 190 between the three events this year. We really need to add two regionals next year to have any real capacity increase without keeping the number of teams per event higher. I'm not sure we can magically conjure up the funding and the volunteers to add two next year. A lower cost per event district model would sure help in that aspect.

I'd love to see a district model that would still allow say two "non-district" teams per event to come play, maybe at a reduced cost. We love having teams like Wildstang come up here and show us different ideas and ways of doing things, that's the one thing I would hate to lose with the district model.

Again, I am aware (as are a lot of other people) there is ongoing discussion regarding additional regional(s), but I don't know anything more than that. Sorry that this got longer than I intended when I started typing.