PNW District Ranking System Website

[Navid Shafa]

Originally Posted by Mr V

We were quite surprised and somewhat disappointed that more teams are not attending a 3rd event. Fewer teams are playing at a 3rd district event than played the more expensive 2nd regional. I sent out a couple of emails encouraging teams to attend a 3rd event but of those people who responded their concern was the time from school and work that was the deciding factor.

You'd be asking teams who did 1 or 2 events last year to now do 4, or potentially 5 with District and World Championships. We did 4 events last year; 3 back-to-back regionals and then a championship. Even if we picked closer venues and didn't have Thursday's at events, I'd personally rather not do 4 like this again if possible. I can’t imagine adding a fifth. Not only was this hard on students and mentors with time away from work/school, we had very little time in between to prepare.

Also our robot saw some major wear and tear before we even hit championships. Seeing how grueling that alone was last year, and with the kind of damage we already witnessed in week 1 this year, most teams won't be prepared for this.

On top of this, it starts to get expensive fast. For PNW teams in the I-5 corridor, they could have the luxury of attending 3 districts relatively close to home. Travel costs become practically a non-issue for these teams and lodging costs are irrelevant (These teams can now essentially do 3 for less than the price of 2 last year). For a minority of teams however, attempting to do 3 becomes more expensive. A second or third event, not including District or World Champs require additional travel and lodging expenses.

I definitely like the idea of an extra event in theory, but I understand why many teams wouldn't opt to do so. After thinking a while, I see only 3 main motives to register for an additional event:

1) For teams who don't build a practice robot, one of the benefits is additional practice time.
2) An additional 6 hours of unbag time to work on the competition robot.
3) A third event offers an additional opportunity to present Chairman's and in turn to qualify for the District Championship.

Although the rationale behind these decisions can be justified, I still see them as somewhat self-indulgent ones at that. Due to the way the District point system works, a team competing again for their third event hurts teams who are attending as one of their two qualifying districts. Points are not attributed to this third team’s record and are essentially removed from the system. i.e. If a team participates in eliminations or wins any awards, they are then taking away the opportunity from other teams to earn points towards the District Championship qualification system.

In my opinion, there is a significant difference between going to three regionals and three districts. Going to three regionals with the wild card system, your choices and sacrifices essentially affect only your team. As much as we all love to play robots, not every team has the choice to go to a third event in either setup, should they also be affected by the choices that other teams make? If I were hellbent on attending a third event in the current regional/district structure, I would choose to attend two districts and a regional instead.

Just my $0.02

These opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of my team and or any of my other affiliations.