Regional Selection Process

[JVN]

With Bill Miller unveiling the tentative regional schedule, it got me thinking about which events 148 will attend this season. That got me thinking about what exactly makes us choose the regionals we do and I began to analyze our criteria for regional selection... which of course made me wonder, what do other teams do?

How does your team select which regionals you attend? Do you have a specific set of criteria?

Some of 148's criteria:

• Dallas is our "home regional".

• We like to stay in Texas.

• We want to travel somewhere interesting.

• We don't want to travel -- we are cheap.

• We want to play with the big dogs.

• We don't like back-to-back regionals.

• We don't like week 1 regionals.

• We like week 1 regionals.

• We don't like regionals in "party locales."

I thought this was an interesting thing to think about, so I posted more info (including some justifications for our criteria) here:
http://jvengineering.blogspot.com/20...l-choices.html

[AdamHeard]

I was about to post on your blog that you should post this on chief because it was good advice... Clearly way ahead of me.

[RoboDesigners]

Originally Posted by JVN

• We don't like week 1 regionals.

• We like week 1 regionals.

Not sure if I quite understand...

[Basel A]

Originally Posted by RoboDesigners

Not sure if I quite understand...

Rationale was given in the blog. What is there to not understand? It's not like they're contradictory statements or anything. (I suspect John really means "There is an aspect by which we like week 1 regionals" as opposed to the original one, which implied an overall liking of week one regionals, contradicting the other list item you quoted [or at least its implication])

[DonRotolo]

We like week 1 regionals - it's a more level playing field, where nobody has one or more regionals under their belt.

We dislike week 1 regionals - the glitches try our patience, and sometimes we get more character-building than we prefer.

Our criteria are similar: Trenton is (was?) our "home" regional (and plenty of big dogs there), we want to go somewhere interesting, but not too far (airfares are expensive), Never-ever a back-to-back (more a schoolwork thing) and the kids need to remain relatively safe.

[RoboDesigners]

ooh... didn't read the blog first... oops

[ATannahill]

Team 79 usually goes to the Florida Regional and another regional over our spring break. This way students don't miss as much school.

[Doug G]

I for one am sick of week 1 regionals. We always felt we did better at our "home" regional if we did an away regional before hand. Since our home regional is almost always week 3, this means we do a week 1. We have done 5 years of this and each year, the week 1 regional seems to get more and more frustrating and less productive - character building as John would say. This might be a year we try some change and go for a "home" regional first and "away" second.

[Ian Curtis]

I only competed at Week 1 regionals, but I really liked them. I agree there was occasionally "character building*", but I think its much easier to build a great Week 1 bot than a great Week 5 robot. The feel I've gotten over the past 7 (eep, I'm old!) years, is that if you can reliably score the game pieces you start with in week 1, you'll be playing on Saturday afternoon. Later on in the season, as everyone gets tuned up, you really need to be able to make a 2nd and 3rd trip to the goal. (Obviously, winning isn't everything, but it is more fun to be in the hunt!)

*To be fair though, outside of 2009's static issues, I can't remember any of the other field delays.

[Taylor]

1. The school board only allows us to take township buses within the state border.
2. Charter bus is expensive.
3. We don't have loads of money
4. Boilermaker Regional is the only regional in the state.
----
5. BMR FTW!

[ks_mumupsi]

Darn.... I thought maybe we would get to see you on the east coast

We are just starting the debate now as well. we know for a large part this year we will probably not consider a regional that is not within driving range.

Similar to you, NJ is home regional for us, its 5 miles from our warehouse and it would be unfair not to attend.

I would like to see NJ back at its Week 3 status but that is never going to happen again, I have come to accept that.

Lets see where we go to this year, I dont think we are gonna make it to Dallas again though .. we had such a great time at the regional also, except for the snow in Dallas in March!!

[Wayne TenBrink]

Gotta do the "Home" event (West MI - week 3) and try to avoid consecutive weekends. We prefer to have one event under our belt before our home event, which pushes us to a week 1 event.

I used to prefer to sit out Week 1 so we could see how the game played out & plan our hardware improvements before we had to compete. However, since the MI district format guarantees us at least 2 events, I have developed a fondness for week 1. Every team designs and builds their robots in an experience vacuum. The initial hardware and strategy is based entirely on their own imagination and planning. Nobody knows how things will work out, and everyone is in the same boat. This "newness" is soon lost as the game develops. Continuous improvement is great aspect of FRC, but it is cool to be there at the beginning.

[JesseK]

Good list John. Our criteria are similar (DC is our 'home'), with two more notable questions for the 2nd Regional:

• Which regional would our Sponsor(s) prefer that we go to?
• Where can we go such that the local economical and regional engineering influences are different than ours?

In the past one of the sponsors has requested a specific regional because it then allowed us to give that company's site (local to the regional) a demonstration of FIRST and our program.

Additionally, traveling to other regionals further away from us has allowed us to get out of our own locally-based paradigms of funding, design processes (i.e. software development cycles), and general style. To this day the Cheesy Poofs and Pink would be simple team numbers on CD, except we went to Las Vegas in 2007 and Florida in 2009. It also allowed us to meet up with Exploding Bacon in Florida to get to know the advantages/challenges to an NPO-based team over many days in person rather than via email. Philadelphia ('08) is laden with teams who are just as great off the field as they are on the field, and the matches were very exciting for Drexel having such a 'small' venue.

[dodar]

Originally Posted by rtfgnow

Team 79 usually goes to the Florida Regional and another regional over our spring break. This way students don't miss as much school.

Thats pretty much exactly how we choose our 2nd regional. The other contributing factors usually are what can we do for fun when not at the regional and how well do we think we would fare against teams know to go or that are going to that regional. Going to Florida which is week 2 and having the high school spring break for our county during week 5 does kinda stink cause waiting 3 weeks in between regionals always seems like forever.

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by iCurtis

*To be fair though, outside of 2009's static issues, I can't remember any of the other field delays.

You must not have been around for the failed Hatch experiments. Those were some bad week 1 regionals. Both times.