(This is assuming the 2021 season happens. This is not guaranteed. For the sake of discussion, lets assume at least one event does happen.)
I think it’s pretty clear that we’ll see at least a handful of teams temporarily or permanently cease operations due to the economic recession that’s coming our way; either due to school rules on meetings due to COVID-19, or due to losing sponsors due to those businesses losing revenue.
For the teams that survive, though - will they still have events to attend?
I’m unfortunately not blessed to live within the geographical confines of a district system (for now), so my concerns primarily lie with the regional system. Many regionals have already run in the red in the past (citation needed), so I am sure that this situation is not going to help that. Remember that your registration fees do not go to the regional directly - they go to FIRST; regionals must raise funding for the event by themselves from local sponsors. Occasionally, FIRST HQ has covered the extra costs of some regionals (citation needed) in order to make sure the event happens.
For example, here in upstate New York, our events are pretty much at the mercy of the colleges we hold the events in (so much so that we nearly had all 3 of our events on the same weekend this year). What happens if one school says “nah, no event this year, too much risk?” What happens if all 3 say that? What if the RPC is unable to find an affordable alternative venue? (not that I’d fault them - this is a hard situation.)
Perhaps I’m overly worried. Perhaps I’m not. Are you?
I guess I’m more worried about the immediate future than I am about 2021 event attrition… whether my wedding will need to be postponed, whether my fianceé will be able to find be able to find a job in this economy, my family’s health…
But yes I do expect there to be attrition across the program in the next year or so including teams and events. That’s one reason I appreciate FIRST’s decision to take a conservative approach by relaying Infinite Recharge.
I don’t think you’re overly worried at all. I don’t believe all states/countries will be able to compete in the 2021 season due to restrictions. I think many venues may not be open.
I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m worried about losing events, but I expect a decline in them if they happen at all. It’s a long ways out, but I’m guessing social distancing protocols are going to be in place for a very long time, and Robotics doesn’t exactly modify well to meet those guidelines.
Also Regionals tend to happen in big expensive venues, and a lot of sponsors are rightfully pulling back support. So I’d suspect some of those are going to equally pull back on scale or size.
It appears to me that one side benefit of replaying IR is FIRST can push registration back. My impression has been that registration opens in late September so FIRST can fund and get the KOPs ready for kickoff. Replaying the game takes that out of the schedule. Since the events have to be in place when registration opens, delaying registration a few months would probably be helpful to the RPCs.
I voted for “I’m worried” about both, but I think the more accurate response would have been “I think it’s still too early to speculate on the state of the world in a year” (or even half a year when the event schedule needs to be finalized by)
While I do expect great losses from sponsors. I am sure that colleges and universities will step it up in terms of in-kind sponsorship such as venues for events. I do believe that universities will still sponsor FIRST with free event space as I assume was done before (at least in Ontario). While monetary support will go down, it can be covered by unfortunately keeping registration fees at the same level and saving on game field costs and possible downsizing of district champs to smaller venues (here in Ontario it’s 2 fields at a professional stadium). Instead to save on cost we can move to 1 field at Ryerson (which is actually once hosted the maple leafs so is pretty large).
This is however biased in that all our venues are government owned (through universities) here in Ontario. I am more worried about actual participants and team survival then individual event costs.
It all depends on regions, how the first wave was, how bad the second wave was, etc.
I have a feeling Canadian Pacific and Rockies will be fine for 2021, however, what interests me is how many teams would be able to go. Rockies especially is heavily international, so unless international travel is back to normal, it might just be the bare minimum 24 teams (based on region numbers, ignoring team lost, which is going to be a big factor.) I wonder how other international regionals will be, if they will be similar to this.
Akash - I hope you go through with your wedding in August - Hold it virtual - many of us will / would be honored to celebrate it! - you can always have a physical party in the future.
I’m going to go the other direction - I think we’ll see more smaller-scale events (20-30 teams) in Regional areas and a limit on how far teams can travel to get to said events. This would help with venue costs, as well as allow for larger and less dense pit areas. I also would not expect a 2021 championship event, which would mean a reduction in registration costs so we aren’t paying $5000 for the equivalent of a $250 offseason event.
i like this topi cfor one reason; its all based off if we have a 2021 season or not and that the unknown… we dont know if we will find a cure/vaccine for it by then and life will resume relatively normal. or if the world will straight crash in burn in a hot toilet paper"y" inferno
Based on public and private reopening guidelines, I’d expect in-kind venues to be far bigger problems in ‘more worried’ areas than the money is. Money will be a serious problem in this economy, but at least money is fungible. Locations for FRC events are much less so.
How many towns and schools will really support (much less donate) space and cleaning for hundreds of us—from over a sufficiently large area—to gather around their facilities and personnel? Will their health department back that after surviving their second/third wave?
That said, I’ll vote “Expect fewer event slots for teams in many areas” (regardless of regional or district). Slots are still the primary metric, through travel and schedule options matter. But given distancing guidelines, even if we kept every single event, they’re all safer holding fewer teams. I don’t know if ‘worried’ is my word, but I do acknowledge that the only real direction to go now is down (zero inclusive).
There are some wildcards for a 2021 season that have popped up in the last week or so.
There are studies that show kids turn out to be really bad spreading COVID:
WHO conditionally backed Human Challenge Testing to speed up vaccine testing for COVID. I would have bet money against this. WHO is now saying intentionally infecting people to speed up vaccine testing may be a good idea:
The local paper had an article today saying the local high school was able to reschedule graduation for 7/31 at an FRC venue. So it appears the venues are willing to schedule >4000 people events despite being closed by multiple government entities. The people running the venues are hurting too - even if they appear to be under the umbrella of a stable organization.
I am usually willing to throw out a guess but things are pretty fluid right now.
That is… ill advised. Until a vaccine is created, having a gathering like that in a venue is a recipe to restart a new local outbreak.
Likewise - consider FRC pits. We are routinely working almost literally on top of one another. That’s an unsafe environment, even with masks and safety glasses. Even if you triple the pit size, getting a sufficient amount of social distancing is nearly impossible.
I wouldn’t guarantee that schools are going to open in the fall. At least as we know it. Having multiple classes and multiple people cycling through the same set of desks is not a safe situation.
Perhaps schools will consider keeping the students in place and moving the teachers from room to room. That would be far more sanitary, but it would make teacher’s lives much more difficult.
I imagine we might see many new events, especially in districts, to replace events where school boards won’t give site approval in time for registration.
I don’t think it will happen. The Department of Education put out a statement right after it got booked that in-person graduations whether inside or outside are not permitted and that they don’t expect that to change over the summer. The relevant thing to this thread is that the venue was willing to schedule it.