District/Regional Format

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Wayne TenBrink

I am biased, but I recommend that they "impose" the district model on the rest of the country/world. District lines should accomodate a workable mix of quantity and distance. There would be some resistance, like there was in Michigan, but I would expect that to go away once people realized that they were getting a much better value and only losing half as many work/school days (OK, so maybe that isn't such a great selling point for the students).

If you consider the inverse of the current choice, it sounds rather funny (or sad). Imagine FIRST coming to Michigan at this point with the following proposal: "In order to grow the program in your economically stressed area, we propose raising the fees, cutting the number of events in half, reducing the number of matches per event, removing any objective means of scoring your team relative to your peers, and eliminating any affordable, merit based events. In exchange for this, we have arranged give your hard-raised money to professional event planners and transportation services so don't have to lug that 120 lb behemoth by yourselves, and you can watch the few remaining matches under some really cool lighting and great sound." It wouldn't work with me.

Perhaps if the entire country followed the district model, we could find a way for teams to attend events outside their district. That is the only thing I miss with the FiM structure (we can still go out of State, but others can't come to MI).

Wayne, I'd love to see the FiM model expanded too (because we get so much for our money up here), but imagine having to drive 3 states away to get to your "championship", and one state away to get to your second "district". There team density is such that in many locations, they only have enough teams to fully fill 1, or sometimes two regionals. In those situations, creating enough district events to make the situation workable becomes a real problem, and even moreso when you take a state or regional championship into account.

[jblay]

When I first heard about the MSC format I thought it would be an awesome thing to have in the tristate area. A couple of district competitions throughout NY, NJ and CT would be amazing and it would help a lot of the teams in the area catch up to the Michigan caliber teams.

[MagiChau]

Well Michigan is the test subject of the format because of such a high concentration. Some teams can not even afford going to State Competition even with qualification. Being able to attend a low cost District event allows teams to participate in events with a lower budget. The main issue as everyone points out is that a lot of areas do not have such a concentration of teams. If district events become more common in the FIRST Robotics Competition perhaps more teams will become created? In effect the high concentration of team will become existent by the very system that worked for high concentration teams. Maybe this can work?

[Wayne TenBrink]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

Wayne, I'd love to see the FiM model expanded too (because we get so much for our money up here), but imagine having to drive 3 states away to get to your "championship", and one state away to get to your second "district". There team density is such that in many locations, they only have enough teams to fully fill 1, or sometimes two regionals. In those situations, creating enough district events to make the situation workable becomes a real problem, and even moreso when you take a state or regional championship into account.

Good point, but teams in low density areas already have to travel greater distances to attend their first or second event. For them, even if they skipped the second district event or the district championship (which we still need to pay for, BTW) they would still get more matches at a lower cost than they do for a single event now. Perhaps a streamlined path to the CMP could be found for those areas.

(In my previous post, I didn't give the volunteers the credit they deserve. Just because we aren't paying people to put on the events, it doesn't mean they just magically happen by themselves.)

[Nawaid Ladak]

#1: I've heard talks for New York State, but that's about it. everybody seems to want it in Minnesota, California, the Southeast etc. though.

To answer #2 Honestly, I'm not at all a fan of FIRST imposing the District system across the world. I would rather, create a 4 system approach

District System: same as the Michigan system but in different area's, ie: California, Texas and New England.

The "Super" Regional system: just like GTR in 2004 and 2006. 2 fields, more competition, and more spots to the Championship handed out at these events than at normal regional competitions. Count this as a State Championship without the process of going through he districts. This would work in a area where a VERY high concentration of teams are located in a small area, ie Minnesota, New York, The Baltimore/DC area, or areas where a District model doesn't fit the needs because there aren't enough teams to impose the system... ie: locations listed above, and Pacific Northwest. This would also benefit the outliers that fall into the system, for example teams that are located in Kennewick WA would only have to attend one event instead of going to Portland and Seattle for district events

The "Normal" Regional system: The normal setup for a regional. for places like Georgia, Florida, Arizona etc. who bring 40+ teams to their regional.

The "short" regional system: a setup just like Pittsburgh or Sacramento used a regional with 35 or fewer teams. ie: Pittsburgh, Palmetto, Hawaii etc.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Nawaid Ladak

#1: I've heard talks for New York State, but that's about it. everybody seems to want it in Minnesota, California, the Southeast etc. though.

I've heard a lot for New York State, and something about a Capital Region "district size event" in the distant future. New York isn't a bad region for districts, but there's a lot of separation between Rochester-area teams, Albany-area teams, and NYC-area teams, so I wonder how it would work in practice. Next year...

I want a District system that allows teams from other areas to come to us, unlike Michigan. Otherwise, I think I'm fine with it.

[Nawaid Ladak]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I want a District system that allows teams from other areas to come to us, unlike Michigan. Otherwise, I think I'm fine with it.

Thats one of my major gripes with the district system: teams are discouraged to from traveling outside the state to compete. The real answer to this thread can be found here.

[BrendanB]

I don't think that each state will become a district, but some are large enough to do so. I believe that instead FIRST will split up "sections" into districts. Like Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut could all probably wind up creating a New England District culminating to a huge championship. Although it would kind of look like a lot of the small off-seasons around which are pretty awesome!

But I do hope that FIRST works a way out for teams to travel. Our team traveled to another regional for the first time this weekend and had an amazing time at North Carolina. I would be very sad if others would not have the same opportunity. Yes there will still be travel with districts, but it is not the same when you are meeting/competing with a whole group of teams you have never played with before!

I really like the district set up and how Michigan game play has dramatically increased over the past 2 years. I really hope that by 2012 there will be more in place if not sooner!

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

I really like the district set up and how Michigan game play has dramatically increased over the past 2 years. I really hope that by 2012 there will be more in place if not sooner! But I am sure that there will be an allowance for travel, but possibly limited, such as one travel regional per team and possibly (but hopefully not) once every other year.

This would be more restrictive than the Michigan system.

[EricH]

I don't think it's going to work in CA the same way it does in MI for a couple of years yet.

CA has: 0 regionals in the north geographic half of the state, 2 in the central portion, and 2 in the south. The team distribution (and the population distribution) follow this, so that doesn't really factor in.

What does factor in is that we've got two clusters of teams that are perpetually in the middle. The central coast teams like 973 have to go either up the coast and stay a few days or down the coast and do the same. The desert teams like 399 (Lancaster) and 1641 (Mojave) have to choose: California (typically L.A.), or Vegas/Arizona? It's not an easy question. It's like the MI UP teams, especially in the west end. I have yet to hear of a "good" solution for them (i.e., one that doesn't involve traveling a full day down and a full day back twice).

We've also got 4 main clusters, all around existing regionals.

But what really made FiM work well was the fact that there is one organization that assists the entire state. CA has no fewer than 3 (Team San Diego, SCRRF, and WRRF). They'd have to either coordinate or combine, and when you're separated by 2-9 hours between pockets of teams, and therefore organizations, it's a lot harder to do that.

For CA, a better short-term option might be to put a regional in the middle or expand one of the existing regionals to a double regional. If another regional was added, I'd suggest Bakersfield or Fresno--they're about in the middle, and could act as a meeting point for most of the teams. Long-term, yes, hopefully go district. But short-term, we don't have anywhere near the density MI does, and would want to build up more (and more sustainable) teams before going that route.


You can't just say, "You're going to use this model", because in this case, "this model" was developed in one area with one kind of needs, and those needs aren't necessarily the same in the rest of the country. You have to adapt the model to the area it's being adopted in. I've got some ideas how to adapt it to CA, but they'd need improvement, and you'd want another event or so.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by EricH

I don't think it's going to work in CA the same way it does in MI for a couple of years yet.

CA has: 0 regionals in the north geographic half of the state, 2 in the central portion, and 2 in the south. The team distribution (and the population distribution) follow this, so that doesn't really factor in.

What does factor in is that we've got two clusters of teams that are perpetually in the middle. The central coast teams like 973 have to go either up the coast and stay a few days or down the coast and do the same. The desert teams like 399 (Lancaster) and 1641 (Mojave) have to choose: California (typically L.A.), or Vegas/Arizona? It's not an easy question. It's like the MI UP teams, especially in the west end. I have yet to hear of a "good" solution for them (i.e., one that doesn't involve traveling a full day down and a full day back twice).

We've also got 4 main clusters, all around existing regionals.

But what really made FiM work well was the fact that there is one organization that assists the entire state. CA has no fewer than 3 (Team San Diego, SCRRF, and WRRF). They'd have to either coordinate or combine, and when you're separated by 2-9 hours between pockets of teams, and therefore organizations, it's a lot harder to do that.

For CA, a better short-term option might be to put a regional in the middle or expand one of the existing regionals to a double regional. If another regional was added, I'd suggest Bakersfield or Fresno--they're about in the middle, and could act as a meeting point for most of the teams. Long-term, yes, hopefully go district. But short-term, we don't have anywhere near the density MI does, and would want to build up more (and more sustainable) teams before going that route.


You can't just say, "You're going to use this model", because in this case, "this model" was developed in one area with one kind of needs, and those needs aren't necessarily the same in the rest of the country. You have to adapt the model to the area it's being adopted in. I've got some ideas how to adapt it to CA, but they'd need improvement, and you'd want another event or so.

Eric,
I would add HI as part of it. I'm sure a bunch here would participate as well.

[rwood359]

Are the MI competitions less expensive to produce?
Can two MI events be produced for the cost of one "standard" regional?

[SavtaKenneth]

Me and a couple of friends discussed this a few days ago and we thought the district system would be good to implement in Israel. One of the main characteristics of FIRST Israel is that the nearest regional for us, except for the Israeli one is a 10 hour flight away.

That means no Israeli team competes in more than one event per season because of the prohibitive cost of airfare. Also Israel is quite a small country (six hour drive from the southern most point to the northern most point) so doing bag&tag events shouldn't be too hard. Our thought was that it'd be a way to make the Israeli competition better because It'd give teams more matches to play and more of the FIRST experience.

The main problem we saw with this is that there are too few teams in Israel (55 or so) for the model to actually work. What do you think is the minimum amount of teams to implement the district system?

[Foster]

I'm a big fan of getting more for my money, but I'm a bigger fan of getting more robot competition time for the robot team.

We do 2 regionals (one away like FLR, CT, Pittsburgh, Chesapeake, etc. Some place thats a few hour drive for us) and one "home" event, Philadelphia (45 min drive so the families can all come and watch). Cost $10K+overnight stays

We also do 5 'off-season' events. Three in the spring (PARC, Monty, BR-BR) and two in the fall (Ramp Riot and Duel). Cost $1250+gas money

From what I see the 5 off season events (one day) are just as much fun as the big regionals. In our area (NJ, Eastern PA, DE) there seems to be enough teams to fill all the off season events. Which is a long way to say I think that smaller one /two day events would work and that bag and tag would also work in our area.

At a regional it appears that "most" teams spend the first day completing their robot and passing inspection. (First regional that they attend in a year, and no disrespect meant to your team). So I'd like to suggest that the teams that hold pre-ship scrimmages also have inspectors. If you pass inspection at one of the pre-events all you need to do is pass weight/dimensions at the regional. Inspectors could make spot/random checks if wanted. But it would cut down on the inspection process and be more of an inducement to be ready to play at the event.

One of the things that pops out in this thread is where teams are and how far they need to travel. For teams in Philly events in Rochester, Pittsburgh, Richmond and Boston (and all the places in between) are all a ~5 hour drive. So we have a huge range of choices. That makes it easier here to do regionals vs CA where there is 5-9 hour drive times.

One of the neat things is being able to see other teams at other places (like going to FLR this year and seeing Simbiotics and GRR in action). While it's fun to play with Chuck, Moe and Miss Daisy (which we do 6 times a year) playing with others is also very cool. So It would be nice to be able to pick which "district" event we go to.

[Jared Russell]

I think that districts would work well in Philly/South Jersey/Delaware, but I don't see them working as well in many other areas. Michigan has an unparalleled density of veteran teams and experienced volunteers that only a few other areas can touch - I think that a cost effective but disorganized district system would be less preferable than the current regional system in many areas.

Leaving the choice of what is best for each region - districts, regionals, super-regionals, mini-regionals - up to the teams and leadership in each region is what is best for everyone.