ChampionSplit: A Historical Perspective

[EricH]

Originally Posted by David Lame

All right. If it sounds like the last post puts me pretty firmly in the "one championship" side, that's a fair assessment. That's where my heart is.

My head, though, recognizes that it's not that easy. I can see some advantages to the split as well. It's a difficult tradeoff. But on an emotional level, I want that magic moment.

Yep, that's about how I feel, too.

Blake is pretty much on point with the reason I started this thread. I figured that, with all the "we need to do this" and "we need to do that", it would be a good idea to dig deeper into WHY this or that needs to be done. Sometimes, it's a lot easier to get someone to move X direction if WHY is answered first (and engineers are prime "culprits", if I can use that term--I acknowledge being guilty, and I'll acknowledge answering the question before it comes up on occasion). And in this case, answering that WHY question involves going back and looking at where we've come from.

So, back to the root of the question at hand.

For better or worse, we have 2 championships. At least in theory, this was made to increase inspiration. Theory vs. reality aside, we've got some interesting decisions ahead--either HQ, or us as teams, or even individuals.

I'd like to point out, once again, that for this to work ideally:
--Neither half of championship should suffer in the Inspiration department.
--Neither half of championship should suffer in the Recognition department.
--A single World Champion Alliance is crowned.
--25% of FRC teams should be in attendance at one or the other half of championship (let's give or take 5% here)--this part will need to be somewhat scalable.
--And, we still need to figure out what to do with Chairman's. (This kind of follows from the first two points--still, it's best to call it out separately.)

Now, I know that ideal and non-ideal cases aren't the same. I don't see any way the status quo can be maintained, honestly, unless we give up the 25% number (which HQ may eventually figure out isn't going to work well, but still...). But that means cancelling contracts.

So: How do we accomplish that nice little list of objectives that may (or may not) be incompatible with each other, or with teams' objectives?* And, how do we do it with minimal losses of teams, volunteers, or other necessary components of this culture-change equation?


*For the record, I don't think they're incompatible with each other. But figuring out a way to keep them not incompatible is the really fun part.


(I also recall, from the town hall transcripts etc., that this isn't the way it was "supposed to" work. In FIRST's eyes back in 2011, we'd all be in districts by now, and this whole split wouldn't be necessary. But, we're all slow adopters (OK, MI, MAR, NE, PNW, and IN get a pass on that one), so we get the split. Let's try to make it a temporary one, OK?)