[FRC Blog] 2017 FIRST Championships Allocations for Districts

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by AGPapa

Why does FIRST value the opportunity for non-qualified district teams to attend FIRST Championship, even more than the opportunity for some qualified teams?

Are you asking if I know FIRST's motivations about this? I don't. Maybe you didn't mean it this way, but it sounds like you are asking me to justify FIRST's decisions without even knowing if I agree with them

If I had to guess at their motivation I would say that it is because they want a broad variety of people to attend CMP. FIRST's first Strategic Pillar is:

"Expand access and participation, broad and deep . . . 'Broad' implies in every geographic region, and 'Deep' means starting from a young age."

So they prohibit some teams who would otherwise qualify, and they allow a rotation of teams who would not otherwise qualify. Again, this is just guesswork, but I am confident in the basics.

[AGPapa]

Originally Posted by Monochron

Are you asking if I know FIRST's motivations about this? I don't. Maybe you didn't mean it this way, but it sounds like you are asking me to justify FIRST's decisions without even knowing if I agree with them

If I had to guess at their motivation I would say that it is because they want a broad variety of people to attend CMP. FIRST's first Strategic Pillar is:

So they prohibit some teams who would otherwise qualify, and they allow a rotation of teams who would not otherwise qualify. Again, this is just guesswork, but I am confident in the basics.

I didn't mean to put you on the spot or single you out specifically, I just don't understand the motivation for this decision and was wondering if somebody had a better idea.

I suppose using the lottery to send perennially bad teams makes some amount of sense.

It's odd that FIRST is pushing for areas to go to the district model so much when districts have the exact opposite philosophy on team advancement. There are no waitlist spots at District Championships.

Originally Posted by GKrotkov

Did 3637 get a waitlist spot or something?

This shows 3637 getting a wait list spot.

Originally Posted by Harrison.Smith

Just curious, how many teams are let in off the waitlist every year?

I'm pretty sure there were 59 waitlist teams last year, although that number is going to be a lot higher this year.

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by AGPapa

perennially bad teams

What you call a "bad" team, FIRST might call a "competitively underperforming" team. It's possible to have a powerful impact on your team / community without performing well on the field. Maybe FIRST doesn't have a good method other than EI and CA (only awarded to two teams per Regional) to find them, so they hope that the waitlist will help them attend CMP?

It's odd that FIRST is pushing for areas to go to the district model so much when districts have the exact opposite philosophy on team advancement. There are no waitlist spots at District Championships.

The waitlist is still applied to District teams though, so I don't see a big difference. And actually all District Event Chairman's teams get to attend DCMPs so you can end up with more potentially "competitively underperforming" teams. I see your point that Districts reward competitive play with the promise of advancement though. Maybe FIRST hopes that the waitlist will still pick up those teams who weren't competitive enough to advance to DCMP as well.

[AGPapa]

Originally Posted by Monochron

What you call a "bad" team, FIRST might call a "competitively underperforming" team. It's possible to have a powerful impact on your team / community without performing well on the field. Maybe FIRST doesn't have a good method other than EI and CA (only awarded to two teams per Regional) to find them, so they hope that the waitlist will help them attend CMP?


The waitlist is still applied to District teams though, so I don't see a big difference. And actually all District Event Chairman's teams get to attend DCMPs so you can end up with more potentially "competitively underperforming" teams. I see your point that Districts reward competitive play with the promise of advancement though. Maybe FIRST hopes that the waitlist will still pick up those teams who weren't competitive enough to advance to DCMP as well.

Districts reward performance on and off the field; culture awards get points too. I like that culture award winning teams advance because they have shown off the field success. I also have no problem with using waitlist teams to bring an event to capacity when qualified teams can't be found. If the issue is that districts don't reward off the field performance enough, then the solution is to increase those point values or give EI teams qualification to the District Championship.

Randomly picking teams weighted by how long ago they went to the Championship does not reward off the field performance. In fact, now a team who may have qualified with points partially earned by a district chairman's award could be denied advancement in order to let in a team that got lucky.

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by AGPapa

Randomly picking teams weighted by how long ago they went to the Championship does not reward off the field performance. In fact, now a team who may have qualified with points partially earned by a district chairman's award could be denied advancement in order to let in a team that got lucky.

Yeah, that's the prohibiting potentially qualified teams to allow a broader attendance. I assume you would prefer only those teams who can qualify on or off the field to be able to attend?

[AGPapa]

Originally Posted by Monochron

Yeah, that's the prohibiting potentially qualified teams to allow a broader attendance. I assume you would prefer only those teams who can qualify on or off the field to be able to attend?

I think you and Evan Morrison made some pretty good arguments about the benefits of having non-qualified teams at the championships. I'm not sure if I totally agree that those benefits outweigh the benefits of sending more of those on-the-edge qualifying teams, but I'm definitely more understanding of this change than before.

The point of my last post was to clarify that opposition to this change never came from a viewpoint that on the field success was all that mattered.

[Nuttyman54]

Originally Posted by AGPapa

I didn't mean to put you on the spot or single you out specifically, I just don't understand the motivation for this decision and was wondering if somebody had a better idea.

I suppose using the lottery to send perennially bad teams makes some amount of sense.

It's odd that FIRST is pushing for areas to go to the district model so much when districts have the exact opposite philosophy on team advancement. There are no waitlist spots at District Championships.

I have a story on this: Once upon a time, a team from Northern California was a "bad team". They built pretty bad robots that didn't work very well. Sometimes they didn't even move. They only had funds to attend one regional per year, and they often didn't get picked for eliminations. Then one of the senior team leaders decided that he wanted his team to be able to go to the Championship, so they worked really hard, raised the money and pre-registered (because you could do this back then) for the Championship. The team went, the robot didn't work (they won 1 match and placed 82nd out of 83 teams in the division). But the team had a great time, and met some really great and inspirational teams and came back with a new inspiration to do better and get more sponsors, which they did.

That team was 971 in 2006. The senior leader was me. While it's not the only reason 971 is a powerhouse now, it was a big part of that team's transformation. I have, and always will, advocate for the opportunity for "bad"/"undeserving"/"unqualified" teams to attend a Championship, because it can be very inspirational.

It's not currently in the district system to have waitlist teams at DCMP, but it could be. The difference is that districts are by definition geographically oriented. Those teams will already have played with most of the teams at their District Championship. It's not the same opportunity to meet and interact with the larger FIRST community.

I do not believe that split-champs is the right way to go. I also don't believe that it necessarily helps get more teams "the Championship experience". But I do believe there is value in allowing some number of teams who likely would never qualify for a higher level of competition to go experience an event like that.

[frcguy]

Originally Posted by Nuttyman54

snip

Thanks for sharing, I find that to be quite inspiring.

Coming from a rookie team that attended Champs last year, I feel that it had a huge impact on our students. Just being there and playing matches, even if we didn't do great, really showed everyone what it's like to be in the "big leagues" so to speak. And because of that experience, we're going to work as hard as we possibly can to be back.

As I've said in prior posts, I believe students that get to experience events like the Championship and even play at several events each season are more inspired and excited about STEM than students who don't have those opportunities. Thus, at some point you have to decide what FIRST and the Championship is about. For some it might be winning, but for me - it's inspiration.

[Brian Maher]

If the goal is truly to ensure as many teams as possible get a Championship trip every four years, I'd like to propose a tweak to the waitlist system:

Continue to calculate waitlist lottery entries the same as currently, except do not consider teams who have attended Champs in the preceding three seasons. This way, a team cannot attend via waitlist twice during the same 4-year student turnover cycle, ensuring teams who have never or have not in a long time competed at Champs are more likely to get a chance.

I think this tweak would better align with FIRST's stated goal to better spread out the Championship experience to teams who would not otherwise receive it.

[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by BMSOTM

If the goal is truly to ensure as many teams as possible get a Championship trip every four years, I'd like to propose a tweak to the waitlist system:

Continue to calculate waitlist lottery entries the same as currently, except do not consider teams who have attended Champs in the preceding three seasons. This way, a team cannot attend via waitlist twice during the same 4-year student turnover cycle, ensuring teams who have never or have not in a long time competed at Champs are more likely to get a chance.

I think this tweak would better align with FIRST's stated goal to better spread out the Championship experience to teams who would not otherwise receive it.

I like this a lot and think first hq would too. However, with south Champs and the gigantic number of waitlist spots it may actually be a problem filling them if only teams who haven't been to Champs in a cycle are eligible. For North Champs on the other hand I think this could work.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by BMSOTM

If the goal is truly to ensure as many teams as possible get a Championship trip every four years, I'd like to propose a tweak to the waitlist system:

Continue to calculate waitlist lottery entries the same as currently, except do not consider teams who have attended Champs in the preceding three seasons. This way, a team cannot attend via waitlist twice during the same 4-year student turnover cycle, ensuring teams who have never or have not in a long time competed at Champs are more likely to get a chance.

I think this tweak would better align with FIRST's stated goal to better spread out the Championship experience to teams who would not otherwise receive it.

This would be a good change, eventually, but I think at this point, we actually do get pretty far down the Championship waitlist by the time St. Louis / Houston rolls around (even if many of those invites are too late for teams to accept them). Particularly with the extra spots.

There's also some value in extending waitlist spots to teams who will probably eventually qualify - those teams get to start planning sooner, and the spot isn't wasted when a different team gets their waitlist spot later.