See here:
At the very bottom of the page, it lists the dates for the 2024 and 2025 championships. The 2025 listing only has Houston.
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Oooo one champs as it should be!
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Ooh, that’s only accessible to half the teams…! /s
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Is it really/s tho.
Bc its kinda true
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That’s great and all… but that’s really not what we oughta be focusing on here. There’ve been hundreds upon hundreds of posts about this already, so I’m not gonna bother summarizing, but you can go read one of the several long threads about it and get a good idea of why so many people are upset with this decision.
On a more personal note, I would like to go to champs. I cannot go to champs if it remains in Texas given the current political situation there. That’s it.
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I dont see a problem, FIRST signed an agreement for Worlds to be held in Houston until 2025.
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Based on previous information from HQ, the contracts wasn’t originally until 2025 and was extended this year to 2025 from 2024 which is a problem given the recent legislation in TX.
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Oh, ok. Because I remember somebody telling me about it last year that it was until 2025.
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There are a lot of assumptions being made regarding contract info that has never been made public. We don’t know for certain the expiration dates of the previous contract, if it contained any one-party options, nor do we know what types of clauses the pandemic may have triggered (or, for instance, if it specified a particular quantity of annual Championship events instead of a particular year). There’s simply a lot of conjecture out there about things to which we have very little information.
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Particularly when the community is asking for confirmation on this from HQ and we don’t get much. This so far seems to be the most definitive confirmation that it will remain there for two more years.
As @kierajreed was pointing to, other locations for worlds, the issues in regards to LGBTQ rights in Texas, etc are all covered in other threads. The hope of many, was FIRST would not be adding new extensions to any contract and if they did have an event planned for 2025 that they would possibly move it elsewhere. Houston having the “Worlds” hosting year after year has issues beyond what we think of currently.
Teams outside the US would like to host a world’s at some point but currently we just toss it between St. Louis, Detroit, Houston and … Epcot for a bit. So maybe give the west coast a shot? This would make things easier on Asian and Australian teams on that west side. Or as Alex from Turkiye has asked for a world’s event outside of the US where teams from Turkiye will have less issues getting a short term visa to compete.
Edit: per this other thread
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Pretty sure Florida and Turkey aren’t very far ahead of Texas in regards to LGBT rights. West Coast would be cool if there’s a good venue, but iirc the geographic center of FRC is somewhere around Indianapolis, so Detroit would probably be ideal.
Anyways, it would be great to hear some sort of statement explaining if and why FIRST extended this contract to 2025, and how they plan to offer any sort of protection to students, volunteers, and mentors in this increasingly unstable political climate. Not holding my breath though.
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If you add up all the locations in yellow, along with all of Mexico, and western Canada you get 1447 teams
If you add up all the locations in green, along with Quebec and Ontario you get 1516 teams.
The reason why west coast champs or a west/east champion split as opposed to north/south will most likely never happen is because for the vast majority of teams a west coast champs does not make sense. As this map illustrates if you were to split North America evenly by team count and put a champs in say California and Washington DC for quite a few teams “zoned” for west coast the east coast champs is literal days of travel closer to them.
I wish there was a way to make a West Coast champs work but logistically it would be a challenging sell to FIRST to say the least.
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I blame Wyoming
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Missouri is almost worse at the moment. Shame too, since St. Louis is the perfect venue for this as far as I can tell.
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Florida is actually behind in rights unfortunately. They literally just passed a law allowing them to legally (well until the courts challenge it) kidnap people suspected of being trans. And they already have kidnapped trans kids before passing the aforementioned atrocity. Not to mention the “usual” including preventing medical access and censorship.
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My understanding from discussions I’ve had, including with individuals at HQ, is that there was no recent “extension” from 2024 to 2025 – per the terms of the existing contract, they are obligated to hold the Championship in Houston until 2025.
Beyond the existing obligations, it is my understanding that it would be extremely difficult to find a new host city and move everything with the (relatively short) amount of lead time they have.
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I’m not trying to get into any more arguments about where to hold champs, but educate yourself on turkish law, or don’t talk about it. There are is no illegalization of lgbtq… in Türkiye and in fact it was legalized in the 1800s. The current political yammer climate in Türkiye is bad but no one is about to make laws about it. Also there are elections in 3 weeks which are likely to change the yammer climate. But again, you cannot be arrested for being gay/trans etc.
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People also need to remember that the contract is with Houston, not the state of Texas, since they are the host city and the owners of the G.R. Brown Convention Center. Houston itself is a very LGBTQ-friendly city and has been for a long time now. It’s also a very diverse city and in many ways is very in-line with FIRST’s values. So does FIRST ditch a friendly city because they’re surrounded by a less-then-friendly state when that action will mostly hurt the friendly city? And that’s not even getting into the logistics of a city being able to handle an event the size of Championships. Houston can because it’s not only very big (4th largest in the US) but also has the facilities, which even other large cities may not. There are a lot of issues here that just don’t get discussed as they should.
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WORLDS IN A CONVENTION CENTER UGHHHHH. it just doesn’t feel like worlds
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They are not surrounded by a less than friendly state, they are part of a hostile state. Also, as I recall multiple bills have been mentioned on this site which create a private enforcement mechanism where any individual can bring a suit over what they see as violations of this law. Not to mention, I would assume there are a number of state level agencies with jurisdiction in Houston.
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