FIRST Nationals on "Regular" TV

[ChrisH]

Perhaps I could have explained my point of view better. Some people seem to have read things in my previous post that I did not intend. Probably because it made certain assumptions about the future that were not really made clear. Let's try a real life current example.

How many people do you know who ever played sandlot football or baseball or pickup basketball games in the park or at school? Virtually everybody right? Call it 99%

Now how many of those people played in an organized league like a recreation league or Pop Warner football or AYSO soccer? The numbers are a bit smaller but still pretty large. These days I'd say 75% is conservative.

But let's take it further. How many of those continued to play in high school on their school's sports teams. Big drop in numbers right? I drop out here myself. Maybe 10%

When you take the next steps to college and the professional ranks (let's include top level amatures like Olympians in this bunch) the drop is huge, at each step. Just to throw out numbers and to account for obscure sports call it 2% and 0.01%

Personally I know exactly two people who played football at big name colleges, and two others who are retired professional football players. One of those was a teacher at my high school, I think he played for two seasons. That is probably more than most of you know.

Nobody thinks there is anything wrong about this. That there should be this winnowing process selecting for skills that are rarely, if ever, needed in real life. Like hitting a rock with a stick or throwing an odd shaped object while somebody is trying to knock you down.

Why should there be a problem with having an elite team of technologists to play robotic sports using skills that are actually useful in the real world? If FIRST is truly successful in changing the culture that is probably what will happen. FIRST may not be the best competition at that point in terms of technology. It will almost certainly not be the only one. In fact there will probably be little city and county leagues all over rather than a single large entity.

MOST IMPORTANTLY, VIRTUALLY EVERYBODY WILL BE ABLE TO PARTICIPATE AT SOME LEVEL, IF THEY WISH. Because if we accomplish our goal, we will be pervasive and so commonplace that we will be like AYSO and everyone will play.

But there will obviously be some who are better than others, and people being what they are, some will attempt to bring together teams of "the best of the best". That is where the elite part comes in.

It was only in the 1880's that sports became a big part of American life. Sure people played games outdoors before that, but it was all pretty casual. Over time it got to be a bigger and bigger deal. Now it's hard to find stuff that doesn't have a sports logo on it. I think it will take the same sort of 20-50 year time frame for this to develop. Maybe, when you students have kids of your own in high school we will have this sort of scenario. But even then I think that time frame is optomistic, more likely your grandchildren.


Just an odd thought. FIRST competitions tend to distort odd corners of the hardware market. For example two years ago we cleaned out the national supply of 1 1/4" pipe flanges. When one of the guys on our team called a major West Coast plumbing distributor, the distributor told him that "The flanges aren't available anywhere, and what the heck was going on anyway? They'd never seen so much demand for that part" In one week FIRST had demand for 50,000 (estimated based on two goals per team for 800 teams) of a part that would typically sit in inventory for years at your average plumbing store. In previous years it was KeeKlamps. I think somebody tipped off Sterlite or last year might have been pretty ugly too. I can't imagine that the sales of Sterlite containers that just happened to be Kickoff weekend were a coincidence.

Can you imagine the logistical nightmare if as many high schools had FIRST teams as have football teams? If we get that big we will NEED to break up into smaller leagues. Otherwise just getting the parts might be a real nightmare.