Championships in 2017

[GearsOfFury]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

While your post is incredibly edgy, the shift from one championship to two postseason expos is at best an unknown quantity. The idea of increasing inspiration is entirely subjective, but you can potentially quantify inspiration by team count I guess. If that is your sole metric for a direct increase in inspiration, I guess you might be right. However those of us who subscribe to an idea that an unsupported team is worse than no team also believe that two poorly supported expos can be worse than one adequately supported championship.

Fewer things in life can be more powerful than participation on a FIRST team at a FIRST event, but it's important to realize that fact can swing both ways. Putting at-risk kids into failing teams is damaging. Having volunteers who don't put students first can be damaging. Sponsors and sponsoring organizations who don't understand why a team wants 15k+ to go to one of these expos instead of one championship is confusing for them and can be potentially damaging.

Yes it's unknown. To grow, we must adapt. We must reach more students, and quickly. While a single world championship is certainly inspiring and a very worthy aspiration, does the lack of one stop millions of high school students every year from striving for and being inspired by their state sports championship? Does knowing that you are "only" class 4A champ vs. class 6A champ, or "only" Illinois champ vs. Indiana or US champ, so significantly impact students' and coaches' drive to participate, succeed, and win that we can't go on?

I agree at some point of saturation the split would be a net negative. We are so, so far from that point yet in the reach of the program, we must take risks and exponentially grow.

At this point, in my opinion, the more people we reach, the higher chance of creating successful teams, of bringing more into the fold, of changing young peoples', and our country's, lives for the better.