I figured some people might be interested in the OKC Thunder games across the street from the FRC event. One is during early load-in on Wednesday and the other on Friday evening.
Mar 11 (Wed) @ 7pm - Utah Jazz
Mar 13 (Fri) @ 7pm - Minnesota Timberwolves
and the tickets are the cheapest I have ever seen them ($15$6). (They are cheap for a reason, though). (despite having an NBA all-star and making a strong run at the playoffs - go see them! They are great this year!)
So far I see 52 50 teams registered. We have some international flair, too! The team count looks like:
2 from Brazil
3 4 from Mexico
1 from Texas
4 from Missouri
1 from Louisiana, (not enough gumbo available in Oklahoma)
1 from Colorado (decided atmospheric pressure in lowlands was too dense)
1 from Minnesota (probably coming to see the Timberwolves) (decided last-place Timberwolves weren’t worth coming to watch)
There is a ton of dining in Bricktown (just east of the convention center), but Midtown and Automobile Alley are also on the streetcar and have a lot of good dining, too.
The Myriad Gardens are just west of the Cox Arena (which used to be called… the Myriad). The Bricktown Canal is a fun walk and you can also take a sightseeing tour boat (though there isn’t that much more to see than when you walk). Scissortail Park just opened and looks like a great space just south of Bricktown. Riversport opens for the season on March 14 (Saturday), so if you are into whitewater rafting or really tall ropes courses it is just south of Scissortail Park on the Oklahoma River.
For load-in you drive your trailer / truck / whatever into the arena and unload inside. Hopefully this won’t get messed up this year by the Thunder game traffic flow patterns.
If you have any questions about OKC, please post them here and I (or some other friendly Oklahoman, I’m sure) will try to answer them!
Anyone coming to OKC, in addition to cheap OKC Thunder tickets ($6 each for a block of 4 as of this post time), I just got a promo thing for The Illusionists for $31 at the Civic Center Music Hall on Friday and Saturday nights of the regional.
It turns out that this was the last FRC event to (almost) ever be held in the Cox Convention Center venue.
RIP Cox Arena, you were a great FRC venue with 10’x15’ pits and drive-into-the-building load-in and load-out. And a great location, too, with lots of food and things to do downtown
I understand that there are other options being explored for the regional nearby for future years. Standby.
That’s a bummer. As this was the only regional we have competed in to date, our team got kind of spoiled by the large pit area. I got to hear some of the discussions about venue selection for the new green country regional in Tulsa and it made me appreciate the OKC arrangement more.
Hopefully both regionals find good homes when everything gets back to normal.
It kind of blows my mind that OKC is suddenly a film production destination, but OKC has changed a lot in the last 10 years, too.
I personally think a FIRST competition in Scissortail Park or some other outdoor venue would be a big hit in this year of COVID. Having one outdoors comes with its own challenges (rain chances, wind, sun angle ruining vision tracking just to name a few), but way better than not having anything at all. And if you knew you were going to be outdoors you could have some contingency plans for most of those things.