How do you grow your off-season competition?

[MARS_James]

Originally Posted by Mama Hill

I've searched Off-Season Competition threads and am trying to find an event that has 40 teams in a one-day event. Is this possible? What does your day's schedule look like? how many matches do teams get before the Alliance selections? In expanding past 32 teams, what is the next step? Our goal is to keep it a one-day event. Any and all suggestions are welcome!

While I have never ran an off-season event, I have worked on them in a range of jobs, and from experience the reason no one day event is that big is because you lose the value of the event. As an event runner your goal for the event, and this is not meant as an insult, is to either make money, or break even. Logically most teams who attends goals for an off-season are some combination of; to play the game again, try out improvements made to the robot, practice new drivers and have fun. Once you expand your team roster to 40 you don't have enough time to give every team the value they deserve because you will most likely only have enough time for maybe 3 or 4 matches. If you are only giving that many matches then not only will your top 8 not be very accurate but under traditional alliance picking it would leave 16 teams with only 3 matches (that is close to half the teams in attendance). Personally if you charge $100 to attend, that is $33.33 a match, while not as steep as what FIRST charges it still is a lot to justify for an event in the offseason.

Now there is a few things that could be done to increase the amount of matches a team has. One is renting 2 fields, which while not very cost effective, or space effective) does increase the amount of matches you can give each team. The second is to have 4 team alliances and do what certain offseasons do and require the use of the alternate robot at each round, which gives at least 1 more match to 32 of the 40 teams. The finals one is not have elims, which while not desireable, does give each team in attendance potentially another 2 matches. While 2 matches doesn't sound like a lot, quarter finals are usually not that close so potentially another 2 matches is all 12 of your teams are getting anyway (Now up to 28/40).

Ultimately I am not from the same area as your team but I really do think a 1 day event with only 3 matches is not worth the price of admission. In fact we did have an offseason we attended one year that only offered 3 matches due to technical issues and we were promised reimbursement/discounted admission for the following year.