Future First Championship News

[BrennanB]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

I think the comments from others about the FLL competition structure are pretty enlightening. In FLL, pretty much no-one goes to champs, and for the VAST majority of teams, you only see people in your region.

That's pretty much a preview of the future of FRC. The program is going to keep growing, barring a complete collapse of the economy. Champs as currently constituted is pretty much as big as it can get. Eventually, a monolithic Champs won't be able to handle even just the teams that qualify at DCMPs and Regionals. Heck, the 56 regionals this year can qualify up to 336 teams for Champs. It's no surprise they had to bump the capacity. Eventually, FRC would have to slap another qualifying layer in there of super regionals and drastically limit the teams that make it to Champs. And then, for the vast majority of teams, you're only ever seeing people from your region and you're not competing against the best of the best. It really just seems to me like this is mostly just a surprise implementation of Super Regionals. I'm sorry the future has gotten here more suddenly than we all expected, but it did have to happen at some point.

The comments about FLL were actually intended to prove that there is no good reason we need to expand champs. FLL is doing wonders, could be better, but they are doing fine with a ridiculously small qualification %age. This doesn't need to be the future, and by no means is it inevitable.

The solution is to expand and hype up district champs, and leave world champs alone. Since they have contracts, we move FLL/FTC to one, and FRC to the other, which really sucks, but it's the lesser of all the evils. If they absolutely need to have two FRC events, in an ideal world all the divs come together and have an Einstein "regional" ? You have divisional WFA and CA award winners who compete there as well? I don't like the idea of having two WCA teams, not because teams aren't deserving, but that it cheapens the award win for past teams to some extent.