FIRST Five-Year Strategic Plan (2013-2017)

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by BJC

* I put "district" in quotes because it really isn't a good term to describe the model. It is and always has been a system designed to cut costs and increase play time. There doesn't actually have to be anything location specific about it.

That isn't how I understood the original FiM push for district events when it was being done. During the brief time between my hearing rumors of it and the official announcement, I always heard one dominant reason: the quantity of teams in Michigan was too high for all of them to be able to participate in one of the three "local" regional competitions, and there weren't any good places to add more full-scale regionals.

There was a lot of discussion between FiM and FIRST about how to deal with the money part of it, and what to do about robot shipping and drayage. Eventually it worked out that the large number of smaller/cheaper district events was a way to give teams nearly twice as much competition time for a single entry fee. The "bag & tag" experiment was a success and is now the standard for all of FRC. But the first information I heard about the Michigan region was based on the need to accommodate more teams, and the benefits of lower cost and more play time were listed as desireable outcomes of the plan rather than primary goals.