Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Wallace
I think the LV area has upwards of 2 million residents and about forty high schools. If our one high school in a community of about 8 thousand can host a district competition, surely one (or more) of those LV high schools can do it.
Venue rental is not usually the largest cost difference between regionals and district competitions. Professional event management and A/V services make regionals much more expensive to operate than districts.
I served on a regional planning committee for several years, in St. Louis, before moving to Michigan. The regional I helped to plan and run had a budget more than 20 times what my district competition runs on today.
Of course this is not easy -- it takes a small army of dedicated volunteers and some of the best organizers in the FRC community. But surely LV is up to that kind of challenge.
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The LVRPC (which has a strong 987 presence on it) consistently puts on one of the best run regionals in FIRST. If Joe is saying they can't do it, then I believe that they have turned over the rocks required to make that statement with confidence.
254 has greatly enjoyed our three trips to the Las Vegas Regional. We probably would have made Las Vegas our default second regional, if it did not begin to overlap SVR the last few years. It has some of the friendliest event staff, is very smoothly run, and is always a lot of fun for the teams. The Thomas and Mack Center was a very good venue and from what I've heard from 987 the new convention center is even better.
Like Pat, I too wonder why exactly FIRST can't continue to contribute
0.125% of their
$24,000,000 war chest to sustain one of the best events in their program.
As others have mentioned, this will have a waterfall effect on surrounding areas. CA is already totally saturated and can barely support the number of plays required for local teams. Some local teams who were using LV as a second play are now going to be looking for slots that don't exist in CA. Yeah, we're adding the new Ventura regional, but doing so is just keeping the dam from overflowing...it's not really expanding capacity, especially when you look at growth in rookie teams.
254 certainly hopes that Las Vegas will continue to have a regional and looks forward to an opportunity to attend again.