Experience promoting districts in Minnesota

[Mr V]

Originally Posted by Nemo

The biggest problem with the regional system is that so many teams only get to compete in one event. Iterating on the design after seeing it perform on the real field in a real competition is huge. I would argue that improving the robot after the first event is the highest impact engineering experience that FRC offers.

When people are pointing out some of the difficulties involved with creating more events, I hope they will avoid implying that districts can't be done. It can be done.

This a Bazillion times.

In my opinion way too many people who are in support of the District system focus way too much energy on the cost per match advantage of the District system and loosing sight of the biggest advantage and that is that ALL teams get the chance to play twice.

I'd be happy participating in the District system if only allowed for 10 or even 8 matches per event as long as the teams, ALL the teams got to go to 2 events.

As a Senior Mentor I spend a lot of time talking to the Rookie teams throughout the season. Back when we were doing Regionals in the area what I heard from many if not most of the coaches of Rookie teams how much they wished that they were able to go to a second event but couldn't either because of funding or the lack of available space at a somewhat local event. They constantly reported that the students had come up with a number of ideas that they thought would improve their robot's performance. Some may have tried to implement them in the off season but a second event would make upgrading the robot a big focus.

One of the big reasons that I am so vocal in getting more and more areas to make the transition to the district system is so that ALL teams get the advantage of 2 events. I also believe that if all areas have made the transition they we have a good shot at getting FIRST to agree to a greater amount of un-bag time. I envision something in the neighborhood of 15-20hrs of time out of the bag between a team's 1st and 2nd event and also adding time out of the bag before DCMP. It is the Regionals that still exist that stand in the way of making that happen because it would only increase the disadvantage that teams have that are stuck in the Regional system vs those that have the benefits of the District system. I'd still propose that for the first event that the un-bag time be limited to the existing 6 hrs or so.

So yeah I just said it those that cling to the Regional system are hampering giving teams outside of their area from getting a better chance at the full engineering experience of testing their product in the real world of a competition, then building upon the knowledge gained from that real world testing to improve their robot.

I also believe that a complete transition to the District system will encourage FIRST to make the long term goal of the portability of points a reality. A big reason behind the unified District points system was to allow that points portability.

There are certainly people who do more than imply that the transition to the District system would be near impossible and they are often vocal in stating the reasons why it just isn't possible "at this time".