Why Give Open Bids to the Championship?

[Daniel_LaFleur]

Originally Posted by Kims Robot

Actually 1511 has qualified through awards/winning every single year, so in effect, our registration in the first part of the season is given to a team on the waiting list. So they did not "take" the open "experience" slots from anyone. They were part of the teams that everyone seems to agree "deserve" to be at championships because they won their way there. I am certainly not for a free for all registration (no awards qualifiers), but I think the open registration system (opening first to teams that haven't gone - for nearly a month!) is a fair way to go. If a team really feels strongly that they want that experience for their students, they should spend the entire year fundraising. 1511 holds 5-6 carwashes over the summer, and does a patron drive in the fall, in addition to many other fundraisers AND our corporate sponsorship. It is a lot of hard work, but its not handed to us on a silver platter. If teams are willing to work for it and save up the money, I like that there are slots open for them to go. If they want to sit back and complain that they should have been handed a slot, or the award that they won should have qualified them, it just doesn't make sense. Where there is a will there is a way.

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.

I apologize if it sounded like I was picking on your team, that wasn't my intent. 1511 is a team I truely look at as a team we'd like to emulate.

That being said, we, here in 1729, won't go tothe championships unless we earn it through either an award or winning our regional. Our reasoning is that it is a (championship) competition, and as such we are trying to win in the area with which we qualified (EI, CA, regional champion). I believe it focuses the kids more since they know that if they want to go they need to succeed at the regional level.