If you’ve joined us at FIRST Championship before, you know it’s a fun and rewarding multi-day celebration that brings together teams from all FIRST programs to cap off the season. We want to let you know we’re making some changes to the Saturday Closing Celebration of the 2020 FIRST Championship, presented by Qualcomm® Incorporated, in Houston and Detroit to make them even more fun and rewarding for teams.
This reimagined experience for the FIRST Championship Closing Celebration will bring together FIRST LEGO League Jr., FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge, and FIRST Robotics Competition celebrations under the roofs of the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston and the TFC Center (formerly the Cobo Center) in Detroit. Each program will have a custom experience, while a global broadcast throughout the convention centers will keep attendees up-to-date on highlights from each program.
What do you think about this decision?
We should have done this years ago
I loved Minute Maid Park and/or Ford Field
I liked Einstein being held in an arena but I didn’t like Minute Maid Park and/or Ford Field
Minute Maid Park was notoriously awful, and I’m glad FIRST is done with it. I might actually watch Einstein from the venue instead of the hotel this year. The next thing they need to do is cut down on the horrendous 2 hours of speeches that they force you to endure while watching finals.
Last year was only my first year at Worlds since 2010 Atlanta but I watched plenty of St. Louis to get an idea of how it was laid out.
I wish there was a fourth option of, division playoffs happen at Cobo and the entire round robin + playoffs happens in an arena. Taking hours to move for what could be only 5 minutes of gameplay (surrounded by hours of speeches) is such a huge hassle and not worth it.
This was a good idea on paper, but the four hour delay and ridiculous lines trying to get into the venue left a sour taste in our collective mouth: Entering Minute Maid Park
I attended the 2018 championship in Detroit as a spectator. I thought that with what was learned from 2017 MMP and the fact that the long lines were nonexistent, it would have been a good experience to have all Einstein matches played at Ford Field rather than Cobo.
Someone said the same thing in the other thread but it seems like there’s a lot of hate for MMP and Ford Field gets grouped with that as an “arenas for Einstein = bad”. Not that many people experience both but is Ford Field a better set up than MMP?
I don’t like any of the options. I liked MMP and I preferred St. Louis/Atlanta and I like anything that doesn’t artificially add hours to an already very long day.
I’ve had the fortune of going to enough champs that I have preferences about how I like my champs experience to be. Many champs attendees have never experienced any other champs format and therefor only know that “X is so bad” because of grumps on the internet.
You know what’s worse than not liking your champs experience? Ruining it for others.
I thought that Ford Field was a fantastic experience compared to 2017 MMP. The sight lines were good, and the whole spectacle reminded me of the days in Atlanta and St. Louis.
The experience at MMP in 2017 (note that I have not been there since) was absolutely awful. I waited outside the venue with half of my team for something like 2-4 hours before they let us all in. We couldn’t really see the field. Since my team shared a transport trailer with a few teams that were on Einstein, we ended up having to load our stuff on the trailer in the absolute wee hours of the morning before going to bed. In my opinion, the overall experience was worse than what happened at 2012 CMP, for those who were in attendance for that.
We were at MMP is 2017 and 2018, and Ford Field in 2019. The students who were at all three events greatly preferred Ford Field. A couple of students had also attended St. Louis Champs (as FLL competitors prior to FRC) and preferred that experience to both of them. (They still brag that they’ve got to compete with their robot on Einstein – because all the FLL matches were held on the Einstein field in St. Louis.)
I have to say, that’s one of the harshest things you can possibly say about any Champs.
I don’t think it was quite that bad–but sightlines and lines were pretty awful. The delays due to sunlight (Uh, there’s a BIG WINDOW there, you’d think that could have been anticipated?) and then speeches didn’t help.