(Lack of) Value in the Regional Model

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Bruceb

I for one do not like playing only with my neighbors. I like meeting and competing with teams from around the country and world.

I'm a big fan of meeting teams from faraway places. Now that Indiana is doing District events, I figure I can get my "exotic" fix at IRI. :-) I'm also looking forward to further refinements of the cross-district competition rules, with more teams ranging further afield.

The other big opportunity is the FIRST Championship. If you want to play with world-wide teams, that's an incentive to be a world-class team yourself.

That's why we do Midwest, for the international feel.

The last time the TechnoKats attended the Midwest Regional, I got quite a different "feel". It seemed like a big block of Chicago teams with a few further-away teams struggling to be inspiring against a tide of unexcited local students. That is likely because I spent much of my time there trying to work with some of the most underperforming, underfunded, and undermentored teams there, but it's what I took away from the event.