FRC Blogged - 2013 FIRST Championship Registration and Request for Proposals for 2013

[Carol]

Originally Posted by Tetraman

You are not a horrible person for saying this. I've been saying Champs needs to be qualification only for a while now myself.

What this means to FRC is simple: Prepare for more District/Region events to happen in the coming years, eventually replacing in full the current "Regional Event" model in the next 8 years. Having the District/Region model will then ramp up the number of teams that will qualify, and eventually you'd only want specifically qualifying teams to make it to Champs anyway.

I don't think the District model will increase the number of teams qualifying; if anything, it will decrease the number of teams. When MAR was set up, it replaced two regionals - NJ and Philly. Each regional qualified 6 teams - 3 competition winners, CA, EI, RAS. Therefore the MAR championship was allowed to qualify 12 teams - 3 comp winners, 2 CA, 1 EI, 1 RAS, and the top 5 remaining teams with the most ranking points (this info is on the MAR website). MI has a similar system, but as they replaced 3 regionals they send 18 teams to Champs (St Louis Champ, to avoid any confusion). MI has found however, that as the number of teams in their district increases, they add more district events, but still qualify 18 teams from their championship.