New District Events for 2013?

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Also, I spoke with Mark Breadner (CMP WFA Winner and Regional Director for FIRST Robotics Canada) at the Montreal Regional briefly about Canada moving to a district system, and was told that its at the region's discretion, and likely coming soon but likely not for 2013.

I would expect a Canadian district system for the 2014 or 2015 season.

FIRST has been trying to figure out how to restructure things to solve the overcrowding CMP issue. Bottom line is one of two things. We either have to qualify less teams to CMP, or we have to increase capacity at CMP. This year, based on my count of the events, if every team that earned a slot went, there would be only about 25 slots (based on a capacity of 360) left for open registration. At the rate we're adding regionals now, that number is shrinking fast. I think there is probably no more room with whatever new regionals start for 2013. HQ has to do something. If you look at a graph of the growth rate, we're growing faster than ever.

Moving the entire program (or at least most of it, only leaving 'traditional' regionals where there's not enough density to pull off a district model) to a district model could be done in such a way to control how many go to CMP, or it could be used to introduce a split CMP system or something, where regions in the east qualify to a FRC East Championship and regions in the west qualify to a FRC West Championship, and then those qualify to CMP.