Championship Location Announced

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by DevenStonow

I think we just need to accept that until the FRC event structure is significantly redefined, we're unlikely to see the lifting of major collisions.

And I don't believe my question earlier was answered: other than Easter and existing venue contracts is there anything, competition structurewise, preventing VEX Worlds from being during the weekend between Week 7 and Championships?

I've been under the impression that the VEX competition structure is more flexible than the FRC structure, but I assume that the Anaheim Convention Center is a very popular venue for a lot of events and it's a favorite of the organizers and attendees for VEX worlds. There are key members of both competitions, and I assume one of the groups got backed into a corner where they had to take the dates. It's not ideal for anyone, but it is what it is.

I know people recognize the necessity of moving to a larger venue to support CMP yesterday, but I imagine FIRST HQ has to be getting a very beneficial deal to themselves and for the city for them to take this offer. Halfway through this extension on the venue agreement, half of the FRC population is going to be under the district system (assuming Eastern Canada, the Capital Region, and a few other locales put it together by then) which is going to streamline the competition and greatly slow the pace of increasing merit-based slots for CMP, and may even cause a small dip in the count. (For example, if slots are appropriated to an area under a district system relative to the population of teams in FRC, Ontario/Montreal could lose at least 10 "redundant" slots).

It feels like the program is crossing the canyon a lot of people saw coming 5 years ago and now they have to build the bridge across it on the fly. Under the existing system you're going to really feel the burn in CMP in 2-3 years spacewise even if they do everything possible, so this deal might just work well enough for where the program is now.

There are things FIRST can do: set minimum and maximum occupancy for a regional event to event out the probability of securing a merit-based slot from one of these events, add in more teams to CMP while definitely adding at least 1 more division, shrink pit size or size of something else... it can work. No venue is perfect and St Louis may not jive with long-term goals of the organization, but smart people work in HQ and they know what needs improving and they think they can work it all out in St Louis.