Regional Selection Process

[EricH]

Originally Posted by iCurtis

I was, but I think we got lucky at BAE and avoided most of the trouble. I remember we finished at 5PM in 2005 (Team 501 had just recieved the Chairman's award at 5:01 and the fire alarm went off), and I remember loading the truck while it was still light outside in 2006, which means we also got out by 5:30. By contrast, we left after 7:30 in 2009.

(Those were the years it was Hatch, right?)

05 and maybe 07 were Hatch. By 2009, 4FX had taken over the software/hardware for the field controls/scoring. The reason for a late departure in 2009 was probably teams having control system trouble...

[jsasaki]

shucks! only west coast regional before Hawai‘i is San Diego. we'll have to wait and see if we can travel further???

[Chris is me]

Here's Shaker's process.

First, we go to the WPI Regional. It's as close to a home regional as we have and we had a great time last year. We really like the small event size, the fact that it's on a college campus (students can see the campus and potentially tour if need be) and that the field has some strong teams in it (last year included 20, 190, 230, 2079, 3280).

However, we have enough flexibility that we can strongly consider eschewing the WPI regional. Back when we thought we'd have a budget this year one consideration was attending both Waterloo and GTR, using the days in between to tour college campuses, visit science museums, and generally be educational. Unfortunately we found this wasn't really feasible this year, but it's on my list of regional paths I want to take.

For our second regional, we pick anything we can drive to from Shaker High on Thursday at 3 AM. Connecticut, Finger Lakes, Boston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, and Long Island are the main choices here.

[waialua359]

Its too bad that for some teams, the home regional is the Most expensive, from a robot shipment expense standpoint.
I'm sure its a factor for those that do multiple regionals in a season.

[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.

[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.

[Spirator]

We just want to go to a regional, although one of our mentors moved to IL, so we may choose to go to Midwest.

[KrazyCarl92]

With teams like team 20 (my team and notably JVNs alma mater) and team 148 (JVNs team) qualifying for the championship automatically as original FIRST teams from 1992, it seems natural that these teams would want to compete with the best competition. We don't need to consider our chances of qualifying for the championship in choosing a regional because we get to go to St. Louis in April regardless. But do other teams take into account their chances at qualifying for the championship when choosing a regional event? If so, how much would this play into the decision making process?

I'm not saying that winning is everything but there is something to be said for the magic of the FIRST Championship. It's also something I'd like to have insight to because our team simply does not even have to consider this because there is no necessity.

[Aren Siekmeier]

Originally Posted by KrazyCarl92

I'm not saying that winning is everything but there is something to be said for the magic of the FIRST Championship.

This has a lot to do with our event choice this year. We hope this will be the first year we can go to more than our home regional, and since we didn't go to Champs last year, we're planning to use that priority to register this year. I went to Champs with my dad last year, and regional events (while still really cool) just don't compare. We have a good number of seniors this year who are pretty devoted, so we'd like to go Champs. Also, with so many graduating, this would be a good way to get younger members excited about the team and keep some members coming in. And of course we want to try to make as much of a plan of this as possible, instead of qualifying in our week 5 home regional and having to raise the money and work out the logistics in 3 weeks. Lastly, Champs is far more convenient this year: we can probably drive to St. Louis, whereas Atlanta was definitely a plane trip.

Obviously, this is contingent on raising enough cash to register for more than one event. If we can, we plan to also register for the new Lake Superior regional in Duluth (week 2), since it's close by and might get paid for by NASA.

This event schedule would somewhat ideal. We would have a week 2 away regional to right away test and compete with our new 'bot, then 3 weeks to implement changes for week 5 at home, where we might qualify, then another 4 weeks to Champs. 2 or 3 events, we'd get to Champs with a good amount of experience with our machine, and some touchups besides.