Frank Answers Fridays: Expanded Championship Qualification

[EricH]

Originally Posted by compwiztobe

However, I'd like to point that you say "even bigger disadvantage" and that you will be "paying even more," and this is what I was trying to address. You are not paying any more for your events just because someone somewhere else is paying less. District expansion does not make things worse for teams outside districts, only better for teams inside districts. You (and us) always had to pay 8-10 grand for two events, and this number won't go up with district expansion. Their number just goes down, so how is that anything but good?

You don't get it.

A rural team, currently, pays $5K registration, plus travel to ONE event (let's just call that $5K, and include a few of the nice-to-haves like T-shirts in that if it's lower). So, for a measly little $10K (which, I might add, they have fewer places they can look for), they get about 10 matches plus practice at one regional.

Now let's take a district team from a relatively urban area. They pay the same $5K registration, plus travel to TWO events that are within a relatively short distance--I understand some teams in MI can go to two events without a hotel stay at either one!--so let's just say that they pay $2500 on total travel/other stuff (one fewer night in the hotel for the away event). And, they're in a more urban area, so more potential sponsors. $7500 gets them 24 matches at two events.

The rural team sees that they need a second event. Automatically double their budget for another 10 matches. $20K for 20 matches. They're paying more for fewer matches. (They're lucky, their 2nd event is still within a day's drive.)

Now... one or both of the rural team's events "goes district", with the team falling on the wrong side of the border. To get that 2nd event again, they've got to go even farther out--now it's 2 days of travel, or something like that. MORE money. Teams they competed with now have a huge discount for their 2nd event (as in, included with registration discount).



What you're saying is that that's NOT a huge disadvantage, and not getting even bigger. Nuh-uh. It's true that they're not paying more--but what he MEANT to say was "Paying even more than those teams in the district that just excluded us for the same number of events", or something like that. When the other teams are paying less for events, they can go to more events (and more chances to qualify for yet more events), invest more in the robot, all that good stuff.

It's not as trivial as y'all are making it sound.