LAS VEGAS REGIONAL... terminated?

[James3245]

I think FIRST should be careful. If only from a core-relations-with-their-most-ardent-supporters point of view. It's a pretty smart and savvy community of people with proven brainstorming skills.

I detect amidst the FRC community, especially among some of the most core community members, an uneasiness about the financials of the whole system. Occasionally it flares up here or there, such as in this case, but mostly it is background, felt mostly while going through the fundraising efforts to make a team, or region or district's books balance for the prescribed FRC franchise formula.

The inescapable truth (someone show me otherwise!) with Las Vegas is that it is needed by many teams, it delivers prescribed FRC event quality, and it turns a big profit for HQ. The driver it seems is that the big profit is not big enough.

It leaves me with a very different feeling about FIRST, and it gets me started thinking creatively about alternatives.

For $20 K our region could get one of the new Andymark fields, one time cost, and start doing "in-season" second regionals. Yes it would be challenging to replicate the full experience but we would not try to, exactly. It would not have been very hard to build and run the basic field of this year. (2013 pyramids would have been harder) We could even run our own, probably unsanctioned, state championship. All we would need to do to fill out 80%-ish of the "full experience" would be to convince IRI or another highly-competitive off-season event to accept our teams so that a team or two could go to a championship-type of event.

Yes, a bit wacky to try to build a hybrid experience that tries to be FIRST/non-FIRST at the same time. And I know I'm overlooking a ton of technical details related to field management. (however, if you unleash say $2000 from 20 teams plus thousands saved by doing it smaller scale) But for those of us who are relatively isolated, it starts to make sense financially as regions, (even financially viable ones) start being pulled by HQ.

it has been interesting, to feel the transition in my own thoughts/feelings over this past few days evolve from to "what? this is really bad, for us and for others" to "how could this happen" to "Hmmm...now I think I understand what's going on and I don't like it" to "this whole operation may not be what I thought is was" to "time to think creatively about alternatives".

There's a point where it makes more sense to take the time and energy of chasing down sponsors for venue and related costs and sponsors for one's individual teams and pour it instead into one's own event. I've never been to an off-season event but my impression is that they can be done very well.

I don't think my musings will likely end up with some kind of fundamentally different model that somehow challenges FIRST, but brainstorming can be powerful and disruptive, as we preach to our own students.