Championship 2008 - Atlanta - Your Thoughts Please

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by Rick TYler

You have entirely misrepresented my point. By saying that I have no idea what FLL teams need I meant just that -- I've never done FLL, my kids weren't in FLL, I've never attended an FLL event, and at Atlanta I spent all my time watching Edison, so I never saw an FLL match there. So when I said "I have no idea" what FLL teams would want, that's exactly what I was trying to say.

Sorry if I put words into your post. I've worked with FLL in Atlanta for the last 3 years, and it seems that whenever FRC needs something, FLL is pushed. Examples: We had to remove all the FLL tables from Einstein Thursday afternoon following practice rounds - just so the FRC referees could sit on Einstein during opening ceremonies. Then we had only 1/2 an hour to move all them back onto Einstein for our rounds, having to shoo the VIP's out of the way. (By the way, thanks to the teams in Galileo blue queuing that helped us carry the tables over.) The FLL judges and referees did not get reserved seating during opening ceremonies, even though we had to be on the field immediately afterward. I will admit that FTC and FLL got some decent recognition during ceremonies this year.

Originally Posted by Nuttyman54

On the subject of FTC, I thought that the volume from the FTC fields were way too loud. We could hear them over on Archimedes better than we could hear our own field.

On Einstein for FLL matches, the sound "pollution" from Galileo and Curie made it very hard to hear what we were doing. We had at least one failed start because the teams couldn't hear. Remember, FLL has to push a button to get them started, it's not automatic.

Originally Posted by Nawaid Ladak

on moving the fields, i think this would be a good and bad idea, bad for people who want to watch the matches from the stands, but good for spacing.

move the fields sideways, and add another field on the back end. it would be cramped, but it would work, you could get queuing near the floor entrances of the dome. and this way, each division would work like GTR did in 2006, (this includes the special 12 alliance elimination rounds.)

Again, the noise overflow from one field to the other would be extremely annoying.

I like the idea of somehow adding another field or two, shared between the divisions, if space could be found somewhere and reasonable viewing areas could be arranged. Scheduling would be just a little bit more complex, but it could be done. Teams would have to pay close attention to where they were to queue up. I'm just not sure where it could be done.

With more and more regionals being set up, something will have to be done in the future. We've only got a couple more years of having open registration for the Championships; after that, only regional winners will have slots to go. If the program gets any bigger after that, we will have to go to a District/Regional/Championship 3-tier model.