Inter-District Play for 2017

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

It's a little surprising that only 11 teams participated in inter-district play. Is that due more to availability than interest from teams?

That's the impression I get. There is very limited availability of inter-district slots, and you don't find out if you've gotten one until very late in the registration cycle (December, when waitlists are cleared). This is too late for teams to adjust their "home" district event schedules, and too late to attend regionals or a third home district, so teams have to basically take a bet on the district event being available to them.

Regional play costs more, but you can register for that as soon as unrestricted event registration starts and if there are open slots you'll get one and be able to confirm that right away. Plus you can actually qualify at those events. So I think regionals have been more popular than inter district play.

Inter-district play can be a huge competitive advantage though if you time it right. 3314 traveled out of MAR to the Waterbury district last year, using the Week 1 event to iron out the bugs in their machine (and still put up impressive scores). This event didn't count for points for them, and they were able to take the lessons learned and then return to MAR with a more competitive robot and team.

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

Except in the case where you have MAR, CHS, and NC all neighboring each other.

CT might as well be touching NJ for the purposes of this discussion; some MAR teams have good access to some NE events and vice versa.