**FIRST EMAIL**/ Five things you should know before you register

[Mark McLeod]

Greetings Teams:

FRC registration opens to teams tomorrow, October 1st. As you are considering your event location choices, here are five things you should know.

1) The Connecticut Regional has changed to week five and will be held in the Convention Center in Hartford.

2) FIRST is striving to ensure all FRC Regional Events have a minimum of 10 qualification rounds. Traditional FRC Regional Events may only have a half-day of practice rounds on Thursday before qualification rounds begin. Sacramento and Pittsburgh (which are piloting a new, more time compressed competition format) will allow teams in as early as possible to maximize practice time. Practice matches will be run during load-in at Sacramento and Pittsburgh (probably on the practice field) and qualifying matches will begin sometime Friday morning. Our goal is to increase the number of qualification matches for each team while reducing the amount of time students miss school and volunteers must take off from work. The schedule for Michigan District Events will be similar to last year.

3) Also new this year is an expanded “Bag and Tag” pilot program for robots. Last year Michigan teams placed their robots in “isolation bags” on robot ship day and delivered them to the event themselves. This year teams outside of Michigan attending Greater Kansas City, Sacramento, Pittsburgh, Oklahoma, Waterloo and Greater Toronto FRC Regionals will be included in the pilot “Bag and Tag” program while Michigan teams continue the “Bag and Tag” program at all Michigan Events. Isolation bags will be provided to teams and directions for utilizing the system will be released soon. Teams may not “Bag and Tag” robots for any other event.

Teams competing at any of the “Bag and Tag” events will be required to transport their robot to and from the event as shipping will not be available. Teams going from a “Bag and Tag” event to another Regional Event or to the FIRST Championship will take their robots home to crate them for shipment to the next event. Teams should give careful consideration to the time involved in the “Bag and Tag” process and the distance between events as they register for events.

4) Several Regional Events will be piloting a variety of cost effective measures this year. Autodesk Oregon, Bayou, Florida, Pittsburgh, WPI, Utah, Connecticut, Colorado, Las Vegas, Sacramento, North Carolina, Michigan State Championship and possibly a few others, will all explore methods of providing the same high-energy, high-quality experience of a Traditional FRC Regional Event without the same expense. Our hope is to find ways to continue to hold costs down in the future by using locally procured and implemented resources.

5) You can find information on the 2010 Veteran and Rookie Kits of Parts on our website here. We have included information on where to obtain additional quantities of these items on your own. For more information on typical robot parts please refer to the 2009 Kit of Parts Checklist until the 2010 Kit of Parts Checklist is revealed at Kickoff. The 2010 Kit of Parts will contain a new driver station for all FRC teams. We believe Teams will be interested in the capability of the Classmate PC laptop Drivers Station.

Bill Miller, Director of FRC
Go Teams!