Addressing Chaos During Morning Entry at Champs

[Cory]

For those that haven't seen it, the "A-Z Guide To Championships" is here.

There's some good information in here that is different than from past years.

Noticeably absent is any mention of an orderly process for teams queuing up to enter the venue in the morning. Frank mentioned in his blog that there would be changes for 2014. I am unable to find any

Problems include:

• No indication of which doors will be opening, causing teams to spread across all possible entry doors and then make a mad rush for whichever small subset of doors end up opening.

• No form of crowd control present early enough to matter (1.5+ hours before doors open). 1 or 2 rent a cops are present to yell at people for standing on the not colored portion of the sidewalk (seriously), but not to enforce any kind of orderly assembly.

• No barriers to prevent people who show up 20 minutes before doors open from cutting in front of teams that have been there for 2 hours. This results in tempers flaring and lots of pushing and shoving

• Some unwise person from FIRST who likes to come out with a megaphone and count down until the doors open, virtually assuring a stampede will occur

• Numerous instances of pushing/shoving/trampling/minor injuries/hurt feelings between teams

Proposed Solutions:

• Clearly label which doors will be opening, so that teams can assemble in front of them instead of running for the open doors once they figure out they're in front of the wrong doors
  
  
• Do what was done in 2011 (maybe 2012 too?) where team members wanting to go into the pits line up in front of the pits, instead of everyone lining up in front of the dome. This should relieve congestion at the main doors to the dome as well as eliminate the sprint from the dome doors down the hallway to the pit doors.
  
  
• Get a few more event security staff to actually enforce an orderly queue outside the doors instead of doing nothing besides watching like hawks for anyone with a foot hanging over into the sidewalk area.
  
  
• Form an actual queue with some crowd control barriers for the first 30 minutes of entry. This should be really easy. Hell, I'd be willing to help out with it and I'm sure the other teams that get there really early would be too. This would solve 90% of the problem.
  
  
• Stop counting down "5-4-3-2-1" to entry...It should be obvious that this is a bad idea.
  
  
• Investigate the possibility of letting teams into the dome concourse early so that they can form queues in front of their division, in the concourse. This reduces congestion and potential for stampedes by 75%, as well as gets teams as close as possible to the seats with no need to run. This may be difficult due to contractual issues of when people can enter the venue. Certainly there must be multiple points of entry to the actual dome from the street though. If there could be another opened on the other side that would reduce traffic by 50% and keep teams from running as much, as they would have to go half as far

Obviously this is the wrong place to compile suggestions. I plan on emailing FIRST with mine, because I think this is a serious problem. Anyone else who has witnessed the chaos during the first 15-20 minutes of entry who agrees should express their opinion as well, or nothing will be done.