Preparing for the Town Hall Meeting on the New Championships Format

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

I don't like this suggestion for several reasons. The crux of my problem is this solution is based on the assumption that RCA winners and highly competitive robots are somewhat mutually exclusive. Yet the eventual Chairman's winner is quite often on Einstein. Hot (67) actually took home both awards in 2005, and you can't tell me 359, 842, 111, etc. don't field competitive robots. So what you're doing is forcing teams to pick which half of the program they value most. It seems like a weird thing to do if we think FIRST is about changing the culture through awesome robot competitions. This seems more like changing the culture OR having an awesome robot competition. To me, it seems a lot more damaging to the spirit and mission of FIRST than just having two championships.

Also, I dispute the notion that having a single, undisputed Chairman's Winner is important to all FRC teams. At the very least, it's not important to me and mine. As I said in the other thread, I would be quite surprised if a Chairman winning team was disappointed that a second team won Chairman's that year. Heck, they say right in the award description that it "recognizes sustained excellence and impact, not just a one (1) year team effort". I don't see how it's mandatory that we only recognize one team per year for what is essentially a lifetime achievement award. At this point, we're growing fast enough that we're creating CCA caliber teams at a rather higher rate than 1 per year. You could probably take the top 10 Chairman's teams, pull one of their numbers out of a hat and be quite justified declaring they should win that year because (specific extraordinary traits/achievements that are different than those of the other 9 teams).

So. I think the beef with having multiple WFAs, CCAs, etc. is pretty misplaced, and I really don't like the concept of officially segregating the two halves of the FIRST mission.

This.

Jane