What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[rick.oliver]

I support the idea of eliminating Bag & Tag. I believe it will improve the mean quality of robots at events beyond their initial event. I also believe that it will reduce the cost to teams associated with becoming more competitive.

I also agree that it is unlikely to change the behavior of most teams.

The District Model appears to be very successful; has it increased the sustainability of FRC teams in those areas?

The data suggests that "Retention" has improved over the past several years.

I hypothesize that the increase in "Retention" has been driven by the expansion of the District Model and the increased number of matches and "out-of-bag" time associated with the District Model has been the contributing factor.

Therefore, I also support the proposal of implementing similar "out-of-bag" times for Regional events and in particular, a "fix-it-window" for teams who qualify for Worlds.