Frank Answers Fridays: Expanded Championship Qualification

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

Then why hasn't this happened already? Why are most regional events and District Championships held Thursday-Saturday? The missed school time has been an issue for a while now, why would we think this would change if we add in a Regional Championship?

DCMP Practice days typically end up with qualification matches being played on them. But that is optional. By increasing the number of event levels you can decrease the size of the events meaning you get more matches without increasing the number of matches played.

Basically, there's a handful of knobs you can work with to get the desired results. Assuming that the way things have been done is the only way to do them is completely invalid. Actually, in order for FRC to scale I don't think our current approach is feasible in the least bit.

Personally, I'd like to see a move to a longer competition season with no bagging.
5 week build season (I've kept it at 5 weeks as that allows for 1 wk proto, 1 wk cad, 1 wk order, 1 wk assemble, 1 wk test)

3 weeks of local meets - events with no judges, smaller AV covering only scores and rankings, and a single elimination bracket. Focus these on getting teams comfortable playing the game and iterating their robot. Almost like preseason events.

Several weeks of district play (districts as we know them) with an attempt to play mostly sat/sun events.

Then we move into Regional (District CMP) level play for a week. But these events are much smaller, still only 40-50 teams.

Qualifying teams go to State/Region Cmp (again, 40-50 teams)

Qualifying go to CMP (8 divisions of 50 teams?)

Smaller events let us keep quality high, use smaller (and cheaper) venues, have shorter events with a reasonable number of matches. No bagging allows teams to iterate and prevent teams from having terrible seasons (and being disillusioned) as a result of poor game eval.

The big issue I have with these is it assumes a relatively uniform distribution of teams which isn't currently the case (nor will it likely EVER be). It also adds about 2 weeks to the competition season (assuming that the district season is still 6 weeks, we could shorten that and make smaller districts to alleviate this issue).

Before anyone says that no bagging will increase mentor burn out. Even with a bag and no practice bot, 125 was still in the shop EVERY night from January until late April. It's your choice to do that, if mentors/students don't want to, don't.