Are 8 play regional reasonable?

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by AlexanderTheOK

I was, until the build season ended and events started happening this year, entirely unaware that volunteer supply was an issue.

And that's a problem with almost any organization. When my sons played soccer ages ago, we went to practices and went to games. There was a referee at the game, we expected that. Kind of like the league supplies uniforms and soccer balls, the league supplies referees.

It wasn't until talking with my sons' coach (who was also a ref) that I began to appreciate the human aspect of it. You can buy equipment (whether that be uniforms or FRC fields). You can rent venues (athletic fields or regional sites). But you can't "buy" the people. Or it would be prohibitively expensive to do so.

When my sons wanted to take the soccer referee course, I went along with them. I did it for 16 years before my knee and ankle gave out. And that led directly to me becoming a ref for FLL and FRC. (Believe me, the worst mentor arguing a call in FRC is a whole lot more GP than the average soccer coach.)

I don't want to be telling other areas what they should do regarding switching to districts. There are unique situations everywhere that will require a lot of work before areas can change to districts, if that is even what they want. Every area needs to evaluate more than just number of plays per dollar. But if number of volunteers per event is one of the things that is lacking - and we have difficulties with that in some FiM events - the only way to fix that is to ask for more volunteers. And give them reasonable pathways for getting trained to become better volunteers.