New York Districts?

[mistersands]

Originally Posted by cmrnpizzo14

There are enough businesses in NYC that would be willing to sponsor teams if you ask.

This is surprisingly untrue in my experience. I, and my students, have been desperately contacting businesses, big and small, and nobody is biting. What you usually hear is 'We don't give to after school clubs, only charities' or 'We can only support programs in schools that are attended by our employees' children'. And that's great for the well known schools where the engineers send their kids (Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science) but not so much for our school. We're still working on it though.

We also are based in Flushing, Queens. So the businesses in our area tend to be very different than Manhattan or Brooklyn. And the businesses in Manhattan and Brooklyn seem to only sponsor teams in their Burroughs.

Yes, upstate teams have more parent support in terms of transportation as well as high budgets (cannot confirm, never actually worked with a NYC team. Just going off what people have said).

For reference, our budget this year was approximately $8000. That was from two big sponsors last year, Pershing Square Foundation and Port Authority of the NY and NJ. We had NASA last year to cover our entry fee and banked most of the other sponsor money for this year. We also had some fundraisers, but they don't go very well.

So after NYC Regional fee, we had about $3000 to work with. Pershing Square sponsored us again this year, so we can bank that for next year's regional.

TL;DR, I think NY should be one district, championships should be in/around Albany, upstate teams have problems too.

I don't necessarily disagree. I might argue for Binghamton instead of Albany. And as long as there are enough district events that we can attend downstate (Maybe one in the Bronx, one on Long Island, one in Queens)

But the NYC regional has a lot of international teams and it would be a shame to lose them.