Registration 2011

[dodar]

Hey Mark can you find out the ratio of veteran teams to young/rookie teams per regional?

[Mark McLeod]

I have that info. as of yesterday.
At this point for most Regional's it's zero.
6.6% of the registered teams are rookies (69 of them).

The leaders are:
9 @ San Diego (vs. 23 vets)
5 @ Oklahoma (vs. 41 vets)

3 @
Pittsburgh, Sacramento, Long Island, Palmetto, Silicon Valley, Boston, North Carolina.

2 @
Midwest, Connecticut, Buckeye, Dallas

1 @
BAE, Alamo, Florida, WPI, Kansas City, Wisconsin, NYC, Arizona, Boilermaker, Bayou, Los Angeles, DC, Oregon, 10K Lakes, Utah

0 @ 20 other Regionals

[Jared Russell]

Historically, do rookies tend to register later than veterans, or is the current dearth of rookies a new phenomenon?

[Mark McLeod]

The majority of rookies usually register later than the veterans.
By now probably more than 60% of the teams have registered (including an estimate of the hidden Michigan/Washington teams), but probably only 40% of the rookies we'll end up with have signed up.

We're pretty much right where we were last season at this time. A tiny bit ahead.
Last year 6.5% of the registered teams were rookies by the fifth day of registration.

[Jon236]

there are 50 more Israeli teams that haven't registered yet

[Mark McLeod]

The majority of Israeli teams seem to traditionally wait and register the last week.

They know where their first Regional is no matter what.

[dodar]

What regional areas of the US regionals usually fill up fastest? Southeast, Northeast, Southwest, Northwest, Great Plains, Great Lakes area?

[Mark McLeod]

Here's last year's graph of when everything initially filled up.
It doesn't show the fluctuations as waitlists were later cleared.

Although, scheduling changes year-to-year can cause different regionals to fill up faster/slower. This is mostly driven by the venue size and the density of local teams, so it's fairly constant.

[JohnBoucher]

More from the @FRCTeams Twitter feed.

This morning we have 1105 FRC teams registered. We're a little more than halfway to our goal of 2200 teams in the 2011 season.

[Mark McLeod]

Thanks for following the tweets John.
2200 would be almost triple last season's team growth.
Maybe some big block of teams is expected later...

Boilermaker is now booked as well.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Maybe some big block of teams is expected later...

The Israeli teams traditionally register late.

Are the "every team goes on the wait list to start with" events keeping the numbers down, or do the wait-listed teams count as registered?

[Mark McLeod]

Purely waitlisted teams don't show up, but the same teams were invisible last season...

FIRST's estimate of 2200 total teams is on the order of 580 new teams over and above vets (assuming the standard 10% dropout rate). That's about double the number of rookies last year, which would be great!

• Texas is supposed to explode because of state support and they've provided roughly 230 event slots for everyone (104 teams last year).
• Washington has possibly doubled their event capacity. But they don't show up on the registered list, so Washington's growth is unknown (59 teams last year). One traitor is registered for Oregon
• Israel is a known quantity and the event capacity hasn't risen from last season, so I don't see them providing a flood of rookies.
• Michigan can be estimated by the number of District events, so they'd need to add District events to increase over last year. They have room now for ~20 rookies.

[Chris is me]

I'm a little concerned that the goal is for 25% of all teams in FIRST to be rookies. Is that a normal percentage of first year rookies to veterans?

Insert the usual "we should do more to help veterans stick around" piece of thought here.

[Mark McLeod]

It's happened before, after all the first year 100% of the teams were rookies
The last time it was as high as 25% was in 2003, but you can see in the table below that 25% isn't extreme.
However, they are usually spread out, and Texas has already experienced what it's like to have a flood of rookies overwhelming the vets. I guess Texas is experienced with the inexperienced...

Year --- # Teams -- Vets --- New ---- % new teams
1992 ---------- 28 ---------- 0 ----------- 28 ---------- 100.0%
1993 ---------- 25 ---------- 14 ---------- 11 ---------- 44.0%
1994 ---------- 44 ---------- 22 ---------- 22 ---------- 50.0%
1995 ---------- 59 ---------- 30 ---------- 29 ---------- 49.2%
1996 ---------- 94 ---------- 48 ---------- 46 ---------- 48.9%
1997 ---------- 155 --------- 83 ---------- 72 ---------- 46.5%
1998 ---------- 199 --------- 137 --------- 62 ---------- 31.2%
1999 ---------- 269 --------- 166 --------- 103 --------- 38.3%
2000 ---------- 372 --------- 241 --------- 131 --------- 35.2%
2001 ---------- 515 --------- 333 --------- 182 --------- 35.3%
2002 ---------- 641 --------- 456 --------- 185 --------- 28.9%
2003 ---------- 787 --------- 590 --------- 197 --------- 25.0%
2004 ---------- 927 --------- 711 --------- 216 --------- 23.3%
2005 ---------- 988 --------- 805 --------- 184 --------- 18.6%
2006 ---------- 1133 -------- 901 --------- 233 --------- 20.6%
2007 ---------- 1301 -------- 1037 -------- 264 --------- 20.3%
2008 ---------- 1501 -------- 1187 -------- 317 --------- 21.1%
2009 ---------- 1677 -------- 1359 -------- 320 --------- 19.1%
2010 ---------- 1808 -------- 1531 -------- 277 --------- 15.3%

[Mark McLeod]

A slew of Michigan teams just got sorted off the waitlist and they have 10 rookies showing.

4 Canadian rookies have also finally showed up.
Mexico has 8 rookies now.

It's up to 90 rookie teams now.

We passed the number of 2006 teams around 3:30 this afternoon.

Championship is Full now. No open slots remain.
This'll be the first year in our team history that we haven't attended.