[FRC Blog] FRC Events Being Posted and AMAA on FUN

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

When I talked to Frank a couple of years ago at Tech Valley he admitted that there are places that just cannot go district because of the lack of teams/mentors/volunteers. There are also places that have a high number of team/mentor/volunteers that are struggling to convert to districts for varying reason. Right now FIRST is split into two worlds and it looks like it'll be that way forever due to geographical barriers that cannot be solved.

Well, there is a silver lining of the scheduling issues in upstate NY this year: we can grow our volunteer base since we have to staff two events (plus Pittsburgh) the same week. That's a plus for the march towards districts, I guess

Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto

Not to , but I think there could be another way. Open up the options for venues in order to find venues that are more flexible/available.

To open up options, the following trade-offs probably have to happen:

• Shrink event size to ~40 teams
• Relax requirements surrounding A/V infrastructure requirements
• Probably host one or two more Regionals in the area (also at smaller venues) to make up for the smaller events

Typically, both Tech Valley and FLR are pretty small events. Tech Valley only had 36 teams last year, and I believe FLR was at about 40. Can't go much smaller than that.

The A/V requirements are set by FIRST, and there is less leeway with regionals than with district events. The official regional quality standards are here, I wonder how much those can be bent...

Multiple regionals is an interesting idea, although I'm not sure FIRST would agree to the additional logistics + SRE costs + field trucking + etc. Here's a thought, though: this is all basically like running a district, but still calling them regionals. What if there was an arrangement a region could make with FIRST to allow their local organization to run the state's regionals for a few years (buy a field, do transport, staff events, etc) during the transition period to districts. That would let the region get its logistics up and running before they "officially" move to the district system.