Why Give Open Bids to the Championship?

[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Kims Robot

If FIRST moves to a "you have to win to register" system, I would hope that they push Championships off by 3-4 weeks to give more teams a chance to not pay a fortune for travel costs.

This is the roughest part of winning your way in. The FIRST time my team won their way in after I joined was 2004. We won a week 5 regional, Philly, and had at most a week and a half to raise the money and book travel. That is not easy to do. We shipped the robot to Atlanta and hoped we could get the money to go.

In 2006 we were lucky enough to win week 3 and still have a week 5 event to go to. We won both and raised the money to go in between.

In my opinion as a mentor the easiest year to plan for was 2008 when were were a pre-qualified team, defending champions, because we knew we could go all year and planned for it raised the money and went. The luxary of that much foreknowledge is a great thing. Hall of Fame and founding teams have that luxary every year and I am jealous of them for it.