FRC Blogged-Districts!

[Steven Donow]

With the release of our preliminary schedules yesterday, everyone can see we’re officially adding two new Districts to FRC. Everyone is very excited about getting these new Districts up and running!

The New England District will include all teams in the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. If your FRC team is in one of these states, you will automatically be included in this District.

The Pacific Northwest District will include all teams in the states of Oregon and Washington. Just as with the New England District, if your FRC team is in one of these states, you will automatically be included in this District.

Teams outside the designated District areas (Michigan, Mid-Atlantic Robotics, Pacific Northwest, and New England) are not able to ‘opt-in’ to the District model. You are either in a District, or not in a District, based solely on your location. Also, currently, we do not have a mechanism by which teams from outside a given District can participate in individual District events as guests (non-District competitors). Allowing this under the current system would lead to complications and fairness concerns. For these reasons, this will not be permitted in the 2014 season. We are working on a system that will allow teams in different Districts to compete with each other, which we hope to have ready for the 2015 season. This system still may not support District event participation for teams not part of any District, but would allow for some exciting inter-District play. I know this decision to allow only teams within District boundaries to participate in District events in 2014 is going to be disappointing for some of you, and I’m sorry about that, but I believe this is our best path forward at this time.



I’ll blog again soon.

Frank

With districts becoming closer and closer geographically(MAR/NEFIRST, PNW+future CA, Toronto area/MI/NEFIRST) it's awesome that FIRST is already starting to look into inter-district play for "next"(2015) season. Also it seems there may be a glimmer of hope to allow an opt-in for certain areas(such as upstate NY)