Is competing at multiple regionals REALLY fair ?

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by skippy178

My main point is that a team competing in multiple regionals shouldn't be able to take home awards everywhere they go just because they have the $$$ to do so, and at the expense of the smaller-budget teams.

Perhaps it's because the teams that have the resources to do multiple events have the systems in place that make them more effective at achieving their objectives (inspiring students, changing the culture, etc.).

Once they go to their first regional competition, it should become "practice only" (non-qualifying) at other events, and that should include being ineligible for the off-field awards too.

Nevermind that many teams fare better at their second event than at their first (which then causes issues already discussed with the competition).

If every team could find a way to attend 2 or 3 regionals, especially if they were geographically convenient to home base, wouldn't that give them a much better (perhaps unfair) chance of qualifying for the Championship than if they competed locally, and then sat around for 4-6 weeks waiting for Atlanta (assuming you were pre-qualified) or else were eliminated and had to wait for next year to try again.

A better chance? Yes. An unfair chance? No. If you've worked to form the partnerships required to afford multiple events, you've earned it. (That's coming from the mentor of a one-regional-a-year team.) I'll leave alone the fact that at no point has FIRST called for its competition to be perfectly fair.

What do the top NASCAR / F1 / Indy teams do between races ? They spend time and money on practice, and practice, and more practice, and throw in plenty of workshop time too (without fix-it windows !). But, regardless of all that, they can't go out and add a few extra races to their season to give them more points in their championships.

In professional sports, the teams get a given match / event schedule, and over the course of the season up the finals rounds, each team will play the same number of games.

You're drawing an apples-to-oranges comparison. In a professional sports league, the teams are all competing together in contests that can only generally happen around one match per day over several months, and the teams in contention don't change over the span of time that play is underway. In FRC, that's a regional competition. To compare multiple regionals with professional sports would be akin to saying that the Atlanta Braves would play the first half of its season in the National League and the second half in the American League.

In FIRST, that's not the case. But, should it be ?

No.