Frank Answers Fridays: Expanded Championship Qualification

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Dragonking

Next year we will have 600 teams at champs representing about 3000 teams. If all high schools had a team there would be 30000 just in the US. How would a 6000 team world championship work.
I do agree that if anyone could pul

I'm not sure why we're positing a linear scaling of championships. Wiki tells me there's ~15,000 school districts* in the US. (Add in other countries, but subtract a healthy chunk that wouldn't do FRC.) There are like 22,000 FLL teams in the World, and they have a very nice World Festival. It's darn near impossible to get into, but it means a lot. (I know it's "not a level of competition". But it's FLL.)

The point is, we can scale if we're flexible about our postulates. We'd need to tap many, many more resources to stay strong and stable at this size, and I concur that's going to be darn near impossible. But if we do, scaling Worlds won't be the way to provide a great experience and an inspirational environment. In fact, the idea that you'd need to a 2014-era Worlds to be so inspired would be downright laughable to these teams of the future.

Why? if we pulled this off, MAR alone would have ~500 teams (60% FRC). If 100 teams gets me young-ish teams like 1676, 1923, 2016 and 2590, then 500 with similarly distributed money and mentorship would be...whoa. And MAR Champs would have a steeper drop off than Worlds does now. And they'd all be closer to home! These top 10%-quality events would be a train ride away from a lot of the students in the country. Imagine a top 10% event in NYC, LA, Chicago, Philly, DC, Dallas, San Antonio, Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, Charlotte, Boston, Portland, Cincinnati, Knoxville, Detroit, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Portland... I'm not very good at this, but you get the point. It's a heck of a recruitment and retention tool.

*We also shouldn't conflate "FIRST team in every high school" with "every high school has a FIRST team".