Hey FIRST - We're going to need a lot more regionals!

[miketwalker]

Originally posted by Raul
I think there will be a lot more teams that will want to sign up for 3 regionals, especially next year. We will need a lot more regionals or FIRST will have to limit the number of regionals a team can attend, to maybe 2.

The main problem I have with that, is if you think about it... your robot really isn't used much as it is. Unfortunatly, unless you attend many offseason competitions (which there is only one close enough for our team to attend each year), your robot only gets probably less than an hour or two of actual gameplay each year. To limit your regionals even more would be worse, ESPECIALLY since teams need to win to go to the "Championship" With what Sara was saying, I don't really know if I agree with simply making the regionals bigger, all that's going to do is give you even FEWER matches, what happens if your robot breaks and your out 2 rounds? If you have 6 qualifying matches that'll kill you, whereas if you have 10, your chances are a little bit better. I'm really thinking that after all of the things happening this year (I'm just not worrying about Megaregionals yet until everything's official) teams aren't going to really have much will to go to the Championship and are just going to stop even fundraising for it, that's what we have done already. I really think that there isn't much that's going to fix this since there are so many teams in the league, up north I really see offseason competitions being the main "fix" for all of these problems, but down here, there are so few offseason competitions. 1083 hosted "Robot Rodeo" this year, which invited everyone in Florida, and only 16 teams showed up, a few didn't come, but for the most part there just aren't enough teams down here to keep a nice flow of having multiple offseason competitions going. I think we need to try to look more past what FIRST can do, because they're hitting a threshold, they have an exponential growth of teams, and still have the same people for the most part working at FIRST trying to handle it all, so I think the solution (whatever it may be) comes down to what teams themselves want to coordinate, and we just need to work on that... I think offseasons are a near-perfect way to start. Just my 2 cents.