UNC Asheville's Wild Ride

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Monochron

I think a lot of it has to do with promoting new teams as well. Western NC as a whole historically hasn't had nearly the amount of teams as the Central and Eastern areas in part because they would have to travel 3+ hours to get to the nearest competition. With the competition in Asheville we have seen a handful of new teams in the West and hopefully that will continue next year. All of that probably wouldn't have been able to happen if there wasn't enough interest in the Asheville competition.

While all of this is true, I don't see why NC FIRST didn't try to push teams into the Asheville event by only running 3 districts and eliminating either Guilford, Wake or CU/JCC. There are not as many teams in Southwest VA as there are in Central VA, but a lot of us hoofed it out to the western part of the state for a travel play instead of relying on two district events in our metro area.