FIRST in Michigan Thoughts/Impressions

[EricH]

From the outside: I like this system a lot more than I did initially, especially if some of the proposed changes are made. It's got potential, and as has been said, some of the aspects involving shipping and such like could easily be translated to the whole FRC competition.

However, at least a couple of people have said that California is prime for the next part of the rollout. Sorry, but it isn't. There are 2 main clusters of teams: Silicon Valley-Sacramento and Los Angeles-San Diego. Each has 2 regionals at this time, and could support probably 4-5 districts. Those aren't the problem areas.

The problem areas are the central coast, the Central Valley, the northern part of the state, and the desert area between CA and NV. The central coast supports about 2-3 good teams and no other teams. The Central Valley does about the same. I'm not sure how many teams are in the large northern area of the state, but I'm fairly sure there aren't many. There are ways to deal with this, including starting more teams in those areas, but the fact remains that until a district gets into those areas, those teams have to travel several hours and stay overnight for each and every event, even their "home" events.

However, when you go to the desert, there are several teams there. Some of them prefer the Vegas Regional to the L.A. Regional, for example. Even some L.A. teams have that preference due to space (or lack thereof) at the L.A. regional. There isn't an easy solution. More space will help, but it probably won't be enough. You could include Vegas and have a couple of district events there, but then the AZ teams who go there effectively don't get a second event (there isn't another one closer than Denver or Texas or Oklahoma). So they don't like it. So you include AZ, and now you've got a huge "zone" with about a dozen or more district events. Where are you going to put the championship? You've got 6 regional venues to choose from and none are central...

I'm not saying that it couldn't be done fairly soon, I'm saying that there are still some bugs to work out before it happens, such as isolated team groups who are closer to other "zones". It's like the teams in the UP in MI. Solve that somehow, and you should be able to take the district model nationwide and have some "open" events that anyone can play in for cross-pollination.