[FRC Blog] 2017 FIRST Championships Allocations for Districts

[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.