Texas Regionals

[MattV781]

The problem arises when there are teams from places like Lubbock who need to go to multiple districts. That is an incredibly far drive for simply a district event. I feel that Texas may simply be too big for the district model, regardless of how many teams are in the state.

[Drakxii]

Originally Posted by MattV781

The problem arises when there are teams from places like Lubbock who need to go to multiple districts. That is an incredibly far drive for simply a district event. I feel that Texas may simply be too big for the district model, regardless of how many teams are in the state.

It's also a terribly long way to drive to simply play 8 times and watch 2 top tier teams and a 24th placed team win, then go home with nothing.

[Michael Blake]

Originally Posted by Drakxii

It's also a terribly long way to drive to simply play 8 times and watch 2 top tier teams and a 24th placed team win, then go home with nothing.

DING! DING! DING! GIVE this man a grant!!

Right. On.

--Michael Blake

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Drakxii

It's also a terribly long way to drive to simply play 8 times and watch 2 top tier teams and a 24th placed team win, then go home with nothing.

A couple things, almost all district events are 12 matches per team. With 9-10 events in the state the competition will be spread out more than it has been. We will see the start of that this year with 6 events. We should see a lot more awards spread out to a larger group of times just because there is more to go around.

[Michael Blake]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

A couple things, almost all district events are 12 matches per team. With 9-10 events in the state the competition will be spread out more than it has been. We will see the start of that this year with 6 events. We should see a lot more awards spread out to a larger group of times just because there is more to go around.

Allen... based on what you know can you state the general team count at these future 9-10 district events?

And will there be a hard cap on the amount of teams at a Texas district FRC event?

Thanks!

--Michael

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Michael Blake

Allen... based on what you know can you state the general team count at these future 9-10 district events?

And will there be a hard cap on the amount of teams at a Texas district FRC event?

Thanks!

--Michael

Not speaking officially at all. Districts almost never go over 40 teams, really hard to fit them into high school gyms and it starts screwing up the points system fairness, etc. I'd guess 32-40 but like PNW some of our further away events might be as small as 28. Ideally everything is run like FiM that has events that are all very close to 40 teams so that teams aren't incentivised to go to smaller events (same number of points, go to fewer teams at smaller events) but we probably can't do that because of how much area we have to cover. No matter what each district event normally has 12 matches per teams.

[MARS_James]

So I thought about the distribution of Texas teams and it is quite sad for teams outside of the majors cities, map is attached.

Texas right now has about the same number of teams as PNW (3 less) so 9 district events should be run.

2 in the Dallas-Fort Worth Area
2 in San Antonio (That 1 little flag in san antonio is 17 teams)
1 in Austin
2 in Houston
The final 2 need to have atleast 1 in the west of the state Lubbock would work but it is to north for the rest of the state and probably 1 south of San Antonio

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by MARS_James

So I thought about the distribution of Texas teams and it is quite sad for teams outside of the majors cities, map is attached.

Texas right now has about the same number of teams as PNW (3 less) so 9 district events should be run.

2 in the Dallas-Fort Worth Area
2 in San Antonio (That 1 little flag in san antonio is 17 teams)
1 in Austin
2 in Houston
The final 2 need to have atleast 1 in the west of the state Lubbock would work but it is to north for the rest of the state and probably 1 south of San Antonio

Texas teams are used to some travel. You are probably right on most of those but I would guess one of the San Antonio events becomes a Waco event since we already have a regional there. Ideally we get more growth in the far west to be able to hold an additional event closer to El Paso.

With the two Lone Star events and Brazos Valley (Waco) we will have 3 regionals in high schools that could easily transition to districts in the future.

[Drakxii]

Originally Posted by MARS_James

So I thought about the distribution of Texas teams and it is quite sad for teams outside of the majors cities, map is attached.

Texas right now has about the same number of teams as PNW (3 less) so 9 district events should be run.

2 in the Dallas-Fort Worth Area
2 in San Antonio (That 1 little flag in san antonio is 17 teams)
1 in Austin
2 in Houston
The final 2 need to have atleast 1 in the west of the state Lubbock would work but it is to north for the rest of the state and probably 1 south of San Antonio

I would agree with the DFW and Houston events, but I don't think there is enough teams currently on I35 from Waco to San Antonio to justify 3 events. One event in Waco and one in San Antonio should be enough. As for the other 3 events I would go for one around Lubbock, one around El Paso (there are 6 teams there and an airport), and one around McAllen/Brownsville (the southern tip).

[jee7s]

A couple years back, a committee of a team reps was put together by FIRST in Texas to advise on the whole District transition. I was/am on that committee. While it didn't go very far, one of the things we considered was event locations. As part of that effort, I did a pretty exhaustive monte carlo style simulation to select event locations that minimized global team travel distance.

The result yielded two possible solutions:
1. Put all the events in the population centers. Teams in cities travel very little, teams outside cities travel a lot, but the global average distance is small.
2. Put events between population centers (like in Waco, College Station, etc). This caused everyone to drive a bit more but still resulted in a small average distance.

Of course, neither of those would address places like El Paso and the Valley.

Also, El Paso isn't just 6 teams and an airport. There was some interest that New Mexico would be part of the "Texas" District. In that scenario, El Paso and Lubbock would pull NM teams in and team counts there would rise substantially at those events.