Information on Hosting Needed

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by Arefin Bari

I wish I had written a whitepaper on organizing an off-season event so it would be helpful to you. I organize the Mayhem (last year it was Mayhem @ the Museum, and this year it was Mission Mayhem) in South Florida. I do have few suggestions for you.

- Organize a planning committee, who meet often, we had 7 people in the committee. (Also divide up the work between the committee members).

- Make sure you got a sponsor/sponsors (try to hit up a college, because it is helpful to them from a marketing point of view) who is willing to provide you with shipping cost of the field. (Have a group of people work with the money and figure out how to spend it and keep all the teams happy.)

- Venue is something you also you want to look at before you contact FIRST. My suggestion would be not to choose a venue that’s outside and under a tent (Trust me, I have experience with this, Mayhem will be inside from now on).

- Get in touch with FIRST and ask them if there is a field available for the dates you are looking at for your event.

- One very important aspect of an off-season is getting volunteers for the event. You will need around 50 volunteers (this past year at Mission Mayhem we had 40 dedicated volunteers who were very dedicated).

- FIRST doesn’t provide a carpet with the playing field, you will need a carpet.

- Food at the venue is also very important on the list.

- Plan out a floor plan beforehand.

- Start contacting teams at least 3 months before the event.

- Also think about how can this event inspire the public, if you are letting public walk in and just watch.

- Lastly, you want to make sure you got a Mike Walker and Billfred at your event so the field runs very smoothly throughout the day.

I am very new to this and this was only my second year organizing a FIRST event. I have got my gurus like John Burke (who organizes the Mayhem with me), also Chris Fultz, Andy Baker, and Libby Ritchie (they organize IRI every year which is known as the best off-season event); you might want to get in touch with them so they can give you more advice. If you need any more information, feel free to contact me. I will help you out anyways possible. Good luck.

I really don't think myself worthy of the boldface; while Mike's fingers controlled the match (and fumbled fewer times in the day than the average FRC event this season), all I did was write things down.

That said, don't be afraid to meddle with the game a bit to fit your needs and desires. Those crazy Floridians (plus one) created Aim, well, Kinda High out of necessity--had we attempted play with the standard field the next day, Mission Mayhem would've been a total washout. BattleCry@WPI historically does their twist to improve the game as well, although I'm sure that theirs are a little more well-planned than ours were. Just make sure that you keep the potential teams in mind; if we had a dedicated ramp-camper in the field at Mission Mayhem, they would've been horribly ineffective at AwKH.

One thing that you'll want to keep in the back of your head is dealing with no-show teams. If you're using the standard software (and it doesn't crash, as it did with us), you could create the match lists after everyone checks in, but that's going to require a copier nearby that you've got the code for. Mission Mayhem manually created the listings for the 2v2 rounds in Excel, which precluded any real ability to change it once 1592 decided to drop out after the rainout. We essentially told their alliance partners for the qualification rounds to pick a partner, any team who'd agree to do it. The rule worked beautifully--teams were running back-to-back matches (and I mean back-to-back; they might switch a battery before pushing the robots back to the starting position, but that's it).

As for food, encourage one of the host teams (or a nearby one, if it's an external group hosting) to set up and run the stands. 1345 ran it at Mayhem, and they did a good job of keeping things fresh, stocked, and moving fast. Just make sure that there's grub for the volunteers as well, either in a separate room or in the form of a meal ticket (and perhaps an express line for key jobs) for the concession line.

Finally, I'm going to underline Arefin's comments about tents. Tempting as they may be, DON'T DO IT! Even if we had played two full days under the tent, the sloped nature of the parking lot made the playing surface less than optimal. Find a gym, a college PE center, anywhere but a tent!