New FIRST competition structure in Michigan

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by XaulZan11

Several people have used this agruement against this new system, and I don't really understand it. How is this new system making FRC less 'professional'?

I wouldn't use professional, but I would use 'less worthy of potentially [tens of] thousands of dollars our money for sponsorship'. Or less 'Wow, that's really unique!' and more 'oh, you have one of those teams too? That's um... nice. Now can you let me get back to work?'.

Look at your local high school sports teams. Chances are if they have team sponsors, it's places like Joe's Service Station or Hometown Bank for amounts like $250 or $500. You don't see Nike or Adidas or Reebok sponsoring high school sports teams for $5k, $10k or $20k+ each. Why? Because there are just so many of them - it wouldn't be economically feasible.

FRC teams as they currently stand can enjoy a lot higher corporate sponsorships than high school sports teams largely because they aren't in every high school, and because they can have a positive effect for the sponsoring company.

And my greatest concern is that it is impossible to cut so much "excess costs" from FRC that it becomes cheap enough to get into every high school without sacrificing the core strengths of FRC from the program. If they do manage to get it cheap enough, you'll end up with a program that more or less is exactly the same as FTC or IFI Vex.

So why kill your "crown jewel" competition model, the one that is great for getting large name sponsors [and their sponsorship donations] and for exciting and inspiring everyone with something that is "over the top" of all the rest of the robotics competitions, just to turn it into a low-cost program that already exists?

It all comes down to economics. I don't think it is economically possible to get FRC into every high school in the country. And this is coming from someone who lives in what is often cited as the "richest state" in the country. There's a reason why the number of new FRC teams in Connecticut hasn't drastically changed for years - and that's all the major sources of funding (corporate and government) have already been been tapped.

And in these economic hard times, with many town and state governments running in the red and pushing severe budget cuts to get into the black, and companies looking to shed excess costs anywhere they can to stay afloat, this isn't the time to look to press for huge expansion of the program. Rather, this is the time to hunker down, shore up the existing resources, and wait until the economy improves to begin a large growth of the program. Otherwise you're setting yourself up for failure when you can't get the necessary funding in place to properly do a district-level competition, and that's not fair for the teams who are "locked-in" to that format.

I'm not opposed to growing FIRST by any measure, but I am opposed to doing it unsustainably. I'm tired of constantly pushing to get new teams started, just to watch them fade after a year or two because there isn't enough companies in the area to provide the sponsorship to keep them afloat. There are much better, cheaper methods (FTC and Vex) that are a lot more sustainable for immediate large growth of the program.