California District Proposal

[Michael Corsetto]

Originally Posted by jpetito

Hi Liam Fay of W.A.R. Lords- Your point two that the "…regional level ambience…" is the high point of a kid's FRC career is germane-- the consistently winning teams do see the points gathering thing as a stepping stone. The teams working out of the janitor's closet on the cafeteria benches in January want to go to something Big, Big, to make all their sacrifices and unplesantnesses worthwhile. What with our fabulous weather, Jan/Feb on the cafe benches still means you're working your robot in mittens and ushankas. Sponsors walk into 5k people at a Regional, shouting and screaming, get impressed and write checks.

EricH- Add to the volunteer conundrum another, which may be a Left Coast mentality: Some school site admin are totally bought into understanding what this kind of education means, and give their sites to teams for only janitorial fees. The majority (anecdotal, but research nonetheless) look at the rolling junk on the playing floor and only see rolling junk; they've an inability to break out of intellectual tunnel they've made for themselves to grasp what's going on. * They are happy to have a kid cite FRC on the college app, but care little for the day to day wrenching and welding and bandaids. Thus kids and mentors delegated to working out of janitor's closets or having to lease space in the community (at market rates).

Hi Michael C- thanks for putting your time in on this- it's a set of thoughtful pieces. On GoogleEarth, take a look at Torrance South High School- we've a great gym, a second Vball gym maybe for pits, but the access is up stairs and through narrow passageways, seeing as how the place was built in the early 60's (and despite rebuilds to make us Section 504 compatible). The California architects expect kids to play outside most of the year and give no thought to fieldhouse size venues and secondary gyms.

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Pits have a dynamic that gets fragmented if you put four teams here, eight over there, a couple next to the playing field, some in some other building. We want teams to rub shoulders and be Graciously Professional while so doing, with veterans pulling up the newbies.

Perspective at the doer level is all. The teacher/mentor/parent/volunteer pool is devoted. I/we want kids to get out of school and be a success at whatever. I'd invite District proponents to play a season with us to get a grasp of the perspective (great perspective smurfgirl!), and fit your good ideas into our socioeconomic/cultural/geographic template--good minds solve big problems--I admit to a crushed viewpoint and tunnel vision as much as the next guy/gal, and like critiques from our vision point.

Joe Petito
LA Robotics

* See the discussion on Quality by Persig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Joe,

Thanks for all of your feedback. A few of my observations to your points:

1. Sponsors want flashy events: I do not know of these proposed "see us waste 5k on 8 matches in an oversized venue and write a check" sponsors you seem to speak of. We have a 150k budget, and all of our corporate sponsorships are developed and finalized outside of competitions. The only sponsor that visited our team at competition last year was NVIDIA, but they are pretty deep in FRC already. Also, I agree with everything Ed Law said.

2. School Admins: For the past three years, CCC (NorCal Offseason) has moved to three different HS here in the Sac area. Not because that is all we could find each year, but because all three schools want to host the event, and we are spreading the event out to benefit more communities. Your anecdotal evidence is fine, but does not 100% line up with the majority of areas already in districts that seem to be able to get high schools to host events.

3. Venues: There are many HS in California. I know we can get creative and make it work. Its a matter of intelligence over convenience.

As an FYI, both Sacramento and SVR already have split pits. Both events have 12-16 teams in a secondary area in order to support the massive 60+ team rosters. So going down to a 40 team event with the same pit split up seems entirely reasonable. No one is advocating for the pits to be in 4+ different places, I'd rather not tolerate that sort of hyperbole in this discussion.

All,

Currently, California is spending over $1 Million Dollars on 7 regional events. We can run 18 events for almost half the price in our first year of switching, with additional savings in subsequent years. I am not proud of the amount of money in California that goes to unnecessary venue, A/V, union and catering charges. I want us to do better, to use our event sponsor's money more effectively to support the STEM revolution we are all a part of.

Joe, we have a ton of amazing minds in California, I totally agree with you. I'd like to put that brain power into solving the problems of "how do we make this happen?"

Keep the conversation going everyone.

Request: Could someone forward me contact info for Volunteer Coordinators for the various RPC's in CA?

I currently just have CVR and Sac contacts.

Thanks!

-Mike