What do you think?

[mike pawlak]

what do you think first should do to limit nationals (instead of the system they have now) and still be fair to all teams?

personally i would have the regionals decide on who goes and who doesn't. i would have building start earlier in the year, and leave a larger gap between regionals and nationals allowing teams who qualify to register and fund raise. thats just my opinion.

[Rob Ribaudo]

That would be a good idea, but then it would ruin what FIRST is all about. The point of FIRST is for everyone to learn and have fun. What fun would it be if only the teams that win the regionals get to go to Florida? How would the teams that did not win the regionals learn as much if they felt they HAD to win to go to Florida, instead of just trying to have fun at the regional. If FIRST was only a compotition, then you would have a good point. But since FIRST is not mainly a compotition as much as a learning experence, your idea about only regional winners going to Florida would not work.

[AdamT]

Do we have to have ANOTHER thread dedicated to this? Check out these:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...&threadid=3343

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ional +Limits

This topic has been discussed and discussed and discussed......

[Rob Ribaudo]

Some realy good points were made in those threads. So many good points were made about this topic. This is what I thought the best statement made was:

Originally posted by verdeyw
What is so terrible about the even / odd system that we have now?

Every high school student in America should be afforded the opportunity to participate in FIRST, therefore we don't want to stop forming new teams. There are too many teams now, so not all of them can go to nationals.

The number of teams that go to nationals has been, until this year, limited only by the cost of attending. This is no longer limiting enough.

So why don't we send the top seeds from each regional? Because that is not what FIRST is about. There are teams that, no matter how hard they work, are so limited in resources and support that they'll never rank high enough to qualify. The beauty of this system is that every team gets to go at least once every other year. If a team performs exceptionally, they can go in their off year, otherwise, they don't have to wait long until their next turn to go.

Any system where there is a chance that a team will never get a chance to go to nationals won't get my vote.

The only change I would suggest would be to allow all rookie teams to go. Many rookies wouldn't go anyway, because of financial issues, but the ones that do will be better for the experience.

I don't believe I could say anything else that was not here. Good job to what you said verdeyw.

[Amy Beth]

I agree that the qualification should be based on this years regionals, rather than the previous year. I would vote to build the robot in the fall and have regionals in Jan. and Feb. so that if a team qualifies they have time to raise money to go to nationals

Also, i like the even/odd system because it gives team a chance to compete who might otherwise not qualify on their own.