POLL: Friday-Sunday events vs Thursday-Saturday events

[ollien]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

Depends if I'm at a district event or a regional/traditional District Championship.

Competing Friday-Sunday at a district event is great. Of the seven events I've competed at since NE moved to districts in 2014 four of those were Friday-Sunday. The main benefit here was no one needed to take off time except for a few of us mentors had to leave work a little early on some Fridays to transport kids and equipment to the venue for 5pm load in. Some students stayed back from load in and this is a great time to have some kids catch up on homework before the weekend. With districts putting events closer to teams it meant we only had at most a 1 hour drive to get home. So far I haven't found myself as exhausted on Sundays after competing all weekend but its a different story for volunteers. Making two of our events Friday-Sunday allowed us to go to three district events.

In 2014 we went to a Wednesday-Thursday event which was really cool. Two full days off of school/work but we had a nice long weekend to recharge. It was also our first event of the year so it doubled as our end of build season rest.

Friday-Sunday is really popular in districts because it is only two full days of competition with an evening the night before. Under regionals/DCMPs where you have three full days of competition, plus load in/inspection the night before, and the event requires more time to commute to a Sunday finish sounds brutal and I'm glad they have kept it to Wednesday-Saturday.

It is nice to have committees working to keep a balance. This year NE saw more Sunday events due to extreme situations but we know they work hard to keep Saturday events on the table for teams.

Friday-Sunday regionals generally have load-in on Thursday evening, rather than Friday. District events are two day events, if you don't include load-in.