Districts in Texas proposal sent to FIRST

[Michael Blake]

Originally Posted by ahartnet

I agree that there will be several more competitions. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's more than the required 7. I also think that the travel burden will be easier for some teams (Many teams that used to only be able to do 1 event now being able to easily attend 2 district competitions within their home towns of Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, or Houston, and maybe Lubbock with little to no cost increase) But I will be surprised if any pop up outside of Lubbock, Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. The team density outside of any of those cities just doesn't justify having a district competition anywhere else, and I don't think anyone has experience running district events outside of those 5 cities. So I think for several teams, more competitions available just doesn't help, and requiring attendance at 2 district competitions may prove to be an insurmountable financial burden. I'm not sure how many teams are in west texas (I wish there was a google map with a dot for every team in texas, but I don't want to take the time to make that happen), but for a team in El Paso the two closest cities that have event experience are Lubbock (5.5 hrs away) and San Antonio (7.5 hrs away). If the point of districts is to have two competitions ideally within driving distance to eliminate the need for a hotel, then that's just not possible with a sustainable team density for the foreseeable future.

All that said - I'm strongly for districts. I think it helps a significant number of teams, helps the teams of Texas from a world champs standpoint, and I'm hopeful that the negative impact to teams will be non-existent or mitigate-able. I'm just think/hope that Texas districts is a set up to function a little different than existing models.

Andrew... what do you think of a financial travel stipend to normalize travel for these far-flung teams funded by FIRST in Texas?

It's not perfect because of the hours of extra travel time you can't recover for these teams but would be the closest to the best solution possible I believe.

--Michael Blake