How do you grow your off-season competition?

[Jon Stratis]

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!

It all really comes down to requirements. Every project has them, and this is no exception. So, sit down and determine the following:

- How many matches per team do you require?
- What is the earliest you can open the doors, and the latest you can close them?
- What is the match cycle time you expect to hit? (This will be different every year - check with your FTA after they've had a chance to experience the game during the season!).
- How many teams do you want for playoffs?

From those answers, create an example schedule. Build it from the outside in - in the morning, set aside the time needed for team arrival, pit setup, open ceremonies, etc before the first match can be played. In the afternoon/evening set aside time for packing up pits and getting everyone out the door, time for closing ceremonies, time for playoffs (With a fixed number of alliances + match cycle time + required field timeouts + a buffer for team timeouts and rubber matches you can figure this out), time for alliance selection. Set aside time for meals (volunteers need to eat!).

Once you've set aside all of that time, you'll be left with some block of time for qualification matches. Knowing the match cycle time, you can figure out how many matches will be played, and translate that into matches per team. Does it meet your requirements? If not, drop the number of teams until the proposed schedule does meet your requirements. Fortunately, this will have practically no impact on the rest of the schedule! The only real impact it will have is when you cross the "threshold" for holding 4 or 8 alliance playoffs (affecting both playoff length and alliance selection), and have to make a decision to either drop to 4 or more up to 8.

Also, when determining start and end time, take into consideration the teams you want to attend. If you have plenty of teams within an hour of you, it's not that big of a deal... but if you're looking to attract teams from further away, starting too early or ending too late could force them to get a hotel - increasing their costs is going to probably decrease the likelihood of their attendance! The Gitchi Gummi event in Duluth found a great way around that this year, partnering with a local college to utilize the dorms for teams overnight. I won't say any of the mentors I talked to enjoyed sleeping in the un-air-conditioned dorm rooms with a few hundred noisy kids, but it was a nice option (One that I and many other volunteers chose not to take ).

Finally, a suggestion... keeping the event to one day is great. But you can spill over to the evening before to allow things like load-in, pit set up, and radio configuration (all of which can take place while the field is being set up!). Maybe add in some conference sessions to make showing up the night before more attractive.