MARC Needs Your Help

[Steve Ketron]

Hello all, I am the person leading the way in starting a new off-season event in Southeast Michigan called the Michigan Advanced Robotics Challange (MARC) and I need help. I need teams to come to MARC. We a know that it is very time consuming and difficult to start/hold an event like this. Teams 1023 and 1528 have accepted the responsibility and challange to do such a thing. However, there has not been alot of response to the registration form request. If I do not receive more team registration forms, then I will have to cancel MARC. To help in the ease of funding, I have already lowered the fee to $100 and I can not go any lower. I understand the scheduling conflict with the Western Michigan Robotics Invitational being scheduled for the weekend after this one. When we scheduled the date for MARC there was not another event in our region on the schedule until late September and this will change next year. If we get enough teams to put on MARC, next year we are moving it to the end of June. Things are i the works in Michigan to resolve the scheduling issue and to have a great set of offseason events in Michigan.

FIRST is known as a community to help out others and I could use so teams help now. If your team is unable to attend due to team members scheduling conflict, please consider using your robot and recruit a pre-registered team to compete at our event. I am asking for teams interested in attending or bringing a pre-registered team to our event to (pm) me so I can talk to you personally and take those teams into consideration before I decide on the whether or not we can put MARC on this year.