Are 8 play regional reasonable?

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by Caleb Sykes

One of our mentors will be volunteering at Iowa and 10K, and I would volunteer at our competitions as well if I thought that was the best usage of my time.

I understand that there are opportunities for me to volunteer in the regional system, but there are clearly vastly more readily available opportunities in the district system.

I completely sympathize with this post. There's a really interesting amount of calculation that goes into whether it's "worth" volunteering at an event-- part of that comes down to what you're doing (for example, I feel like I'm making much more of an impact as a CSA/FTA/emcee when I do FTC events than I do doing field reset at FRC, which makes me far more excited/willing to volunteer over working with my FTC team), how much the team needs you (at North Star, I'll be the mentor for 2667 that has the most FRC experience at the event, which is terrifying, especially for nearly a 10 year old team), and of course work/schedule conflicts.

Truthfully, I'd much rather be in a position to volunteer at North Star (and any event) than not, even if it means I'm just sitting at the safety glasses table. But there's definitely a hard call that needs to be made between that idealism and the reality that I'm probably helping more by making sure my team is running smoothly. I think that a lot of teams have mentors who have to make that call and, rightfully, pick their teams. This comes back to the main point of this thread-- by my count (which might be slightly off-- I did this manually) 166 MN teams are going to one regional event. The majority will not make elims, or qualify for Champs, or qualify for State. Those teams get EIGHT matches. So yeah, when it comes down to it, evaluating cost/benefit for taking one of the incredibly appealing roles Bryan posted as being open as a mentor, it's an obvious choice if you're not from a large team. For a lot of people helping their team and volunteering are mutually exclusive, and this is exacerbated by having double regionals (which shouldn't be misconstrued-- I love our events, it just makes volunteering at more than one other event difficult).

That situation changes when a team can attend more events, events within a reasonable distance are more common, events require less of a time commitment, or a team gets large/good enough that it can afford to lose a couple of mentors for a weekend (yes, this is probably an oversimplification, but I think it covers the main things).