30% Less teams in FIM this year?

So you want this money to only go to the top 3/4 teams then? I doubt the number of teams in FIM had any impact on how good the top 3-4 were.

Does it matter where the best robot in the world is from anyway? Top teams know they have to compete against other teams not in their state, having the average FIM team be better might help them a little bit but wouldn’t make the type of change you are looking for.

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2 of these were first picks in their division? And both were in some part eliminated due to mechanical failures on their alliance. I think the “fall” of fim is very overstated. And you mention Texas, the only FiT teams to be on Einstein this year were 6672 and 4153 (a team actually from New Mexico, which is part of FiT). I will say we are outclassed compared to California as of right now, but I attribute that to California just being a uniquely well resourced state especially when it comes to software talent.

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No. I want this money to go to the 3-400 teams FIM can sustain. I don’t want to arrive to districts yearly with a handful of teams who do not have a drive base assembled. Who don’t have mentors who understand what they signed up for, what is needed for conception, and what can be done to help them. This is becoming more common in FiM. Teams that don’t show up. Teams that show up without building anything because they thought they do it at the competition. There could be a handful of reasons these things happen but when you work towards 400+ teams, these things fall through the cracks and happen. I believe we can spread this money to sustaining ~300 teams instead of pushing yearly to grow to 4-500 and people being discouraged when we only have 450 for example.

I also don’t want to raise the top 3-4. I want to raise all of Fim (mainly for reasons listed above). Putting more money and mentors into teams we can sustain is how I personally see FRC being sustainable in FIM at a high level.

-Ronnie

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That sounds reasonable.

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I agree and also disagree. We were one of the teams that broke (got broken?) and failed to reach Einstein. But I also know if you put us on a field with 254, 1678, 1323, 4414, etc we would be down on ball counts. Not that it matters but we probably weren’t the first choice of 3310 either had we not won our last match propelling us back into a picking position. They didn’t want to play us first round.

Last year, FIT had a down year for some teams. But also others rising like 6800. I am not at my computer but I would be willing to bet that looking at the median of California and Ontario compared to Michigan over the last 3 seasons, there is a fairly big difference in ELO/OPR/objects scored per match

I wish it was to FIM. Instead the agenda until now has been increasing quantity so we can be the “biggest and best”.

I have no desire to take money away from teams. Just want to see teams get the support they need to thrive and not just a survival mentality year to year.

-Ronnie

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Just doing some quick statbotics between Michigan, Texas, and California (and Kansas). When I set the threshold at below OPR 10, that Michigan had fewest percent of teams below that. When I set at above OPR 30 for good teams, that Michigan had the highest percent.

Now when I put above OPR 50 for great teams, then Texas had highest (8/129) and Michigan was quite a bit lower (10/450). And California was 14/260.

edit: Wanted to point out how this is totally arbitrary in thresholds. Lots of Michigan teams just below 50. And also you have maybe some differences in the events these were generated from contributing to the OPR difference between regions too. All in all, I don’t think there is a clear pattern of play in Michigan being depressed from other regions overall.

edit2: Not a single Kansas team broke the 50 OPR threshold, which is a shame. Will have to get FiK to put more emphasis on our top teams😁

edit3: About low performing teams, something more needs done. I see that 10 OPR threshold is not being met by 1/3 the teams, in many cases. I know that you can’t judge the experience by the competitive outcome. One of our engineering mentors for a second was on a low-performing team, but the experience was still impactful. More opportunities is available to more achieving teams, but the teams that limp across the finish line are sometimes doing all someone can and the value is hard to judge, so I get the sentiment of how much financial support should be placed each year to keep these programs going.

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I tried looking at the data with my phone on there but it became annoying rather quickly.

With a few clicks, it was pretty obvious CA teams dominate the top tier. Each area has a few up there…but no one has more than CA, right?

With 1/3 of teams not reaching 10 OPR threshold, is that for FIM or all 3 of those regions you mentioned combined? Regardless, that is concerning and was the root of my original response. I do not disagree there are instances of low resource teams becoming inspired, successful, and learning happening. But is this the majority of the cases? Or is it a minority/good story which is why we tell and hear it?

What happens with the students who don’t have that experience, don’t have the team leadership to guide them, don’t have the resources to show up to a tournament and not feel embarrassed when the inspector comes to inspect their robot and they don’t have one…

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Texas was a little better in percent of teams, but only 8 vs 14.

1/3 was generalizing the 3 states, but Michigan had the lowest at 132/450 (29.3%) vs California, for example, being 80/260 (30.7%). I looked at Missouri, and it was ~43% below the 10 OPR threshold.

Hard to really know. I will relay two different stories. We helped a team at Rocket City in 2017, and they had just students facing lots of issues enough that they basically were disinterested in robotics, but our mentor stayed and worked with the couple of students building from the unfinished kit. We got a letter from their teacher later just how much they appreciated us helping them compete, and now they have built up, have more space, I think went from 2 to 20 team members and competed at two regionals this year.

I guess story two is this year, we had a team that needed a lot of help at Oklahoma, I think several teams were pitching in, but on practice day afternoon the teacher pulled the plug, saying the students had to be back at school at 5:30pm, and also that they weren’t going to be back Friday due to bad weather. It will be very hard for that team to overcome its challenge, and it is harder to see what the student outcome will be, whether they realize how stunted their experience was yet seeing the potential to continue, or if it turns them off pursuing further.

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Those numbers are bad. Bad for everyone. Those are the numbers I want to change: maybe that has not been clear from the beginning even if it was in my head.

I hope the first story can trend towards the norm. I have two from this season that pushed me further down my thought path.

The first was a fairly well known team in the area that has been trending towards low student involvement, low mentor support, and low donations/community engagement. I asked a member of this team how they looked for the upcoming season and they said bad. They pretty much were not going to be a team and did not have the resources to continue. A few months later, another conversation with this person yielded that FIM called them to ask why they weren’t registered and payed their fees according to this person and now said person was frantically trying to figure out how to put together a team, students, and robot. I do not know for a fact if this was true but I believe the person and have seen their decline so I don’t believe it to be false.

The second was at one of our events. A program brought multiple teams and we went to strategize for an upcoming match. We ended up talking to mentors because they did not have students showing up for the amount of teams they brought. They grabbed a student and told him he was going to drive (he showed Multiple times he had zero interest in this and didn’t want to do it). It was a weird situation and made me question by not just bring 2-3 teams with 5-10 students a team and 2-3 mentors VS. 8-10 teams with 8-10 total students and 5-6 mentors.

Maybe my thoughts on this aren’t the solution. Maybe limiting the amount of teams isn’t the solution. Maybe taking expansion money and distributing to 300+ existing teams for a few years would be more beneficial. Maybe it wouldn’t be. But we have to start trying something here to change the narrative and numbers.

-Ronnie

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That is odd, but I remember when I was CSA being by a small 5-6 student team where no one really wanted to drive. I think they basically drew straws. It is a bit weird, I know. I try to be very encouraging of people to drive and let them know that the best drivers didn’t start that way but practiced, and even so I get some that are scared off the idea of it, probably because it is such a public and heavy role. And they are too nervous.

I can’t really say, but I think if corporate sponsors are involved in part of the paid-off registration fees, they more closely watch the participation & team numbers often, so fewer teams could decrease any contribution they might add. I don’t really know if that is significant for FiM.

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That doesn’t make a ton of sense as a justification for the pick. Even if 3310 went with someone else, 176 was 2 and 5940 was 3. 67 would have surely gotten scooped up by whichever one of them 3310 didn’t pick. I don’t think there’s any realistic scenario with those rankings where 3310 would face 67 in quarters.

I also personally think that 67 was the best pick available for 3310, given that they were the best teleop scorer in the division in quals and had a reliable 5 ball auto.

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This is all purely speculation/he said she said at this point. But at the time there was a realistic avenue where 3310 picks 6800 or 176. 5940 picks the opposite of 3310. 67 is picked by 230 and we decline and stick at 8. None of it matters now and we almost did the thing with 3310 and 4451. Loved playing with both of them.

Edit: also agree there is a path where we end up the 2nd overall pick instead of 1 or 8th seed captain.

I agree we were the obvious pick when I looked at it…just not sure others shared that same view at the time.

-Ronnie

How prevalent is this? I guess I’d need to know how many teams received these incentives, because this is first time I’m hearing numbers in the tens of thousands. Even if that is the case for, say, 10-20 teams—which seems high to me—I don’t see how it negatively impacts other teams. My team is one of two remaining teams in a 20 mile radius and the only monetary incentive I’ve heard of was an extra $1000 in the coach stipend to resurrect dead or dying teams. Apparently that wasn’t enough to do the trick because the teams are still defunct, but I feel like a $10k carrot would result in a different story.

Also, why would FiM offering incentives come at a price of lowering the 99h grant for all teams?

I’m on the side of STEM equity and inclusion. I don’t live in California or Texas, I live here and I feel that FRC is by far the most effective program we have to reach high school students is FRC. The fact that we’re able to provide these opportunities to such a large quantity of students is a testament to the quality of FiM. Quantity doesn’t always have to come at a cost for quantity. You’re looking at quality as if it’s all about wins, I’m looking at it as it being about casting as wide a net as possible because I’ve seen how this program changes student lives. Wins don’t mean as much to me—which should be evident by looking at our match history lol.

I grew up in a rural college town and we had amazing enrichment opportunities largely because of one or two arts people who had a passion for education, not because of grants or monetary incentives. That has guided me to do the same locally.

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@RonnieS you were our first choice. The fact that you were in a picking position made it unanimous among the scouts instead of a simple majority.

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This is a flawed thought process about mentors, I think you would just end up losing a bunch of mentors. Many mentors are attached to particular teams and areas. Someone else pointed it out about California having an advantage when it comes to programming mentor availability so you wouldn’t really be gaining anything there. The only thing I think reducing teams would do for fim is shift teams that were on the edge of being fairly competitive to being cut out of playoffs and thus demoralizing the teams that that would happen to. It wouldn’t have the effect you might think it would in making FiM have the really high end teams it would probably just make more middle of the pack teams or good teams but not great teams

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This :100:

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I am not sure if we will ever know. Maybe someone like Gail can shed light onto amount of teams we intially get registration for, how many teams FIM calls to beg to come back for 2022, etc but I am not sure we will ever get a good number.

We do know that out of FIM’s 458 teams last season, 8 teams never competed and I believe 3 teams only competed at one tournmanet.

2018 we had 508 teams, 3 only playing once and 2 teams never playing.
2019 we had 542 teams, 1 only playin once and 3 teams never playing.

Pre-covid, the plans were to expand MSC and I can only assume that FIM wanted to continue growing the level of teams or staying near 550? With almost a 100 team drop from 2019 to 2022 (Yes I know the pandemic has a large part in this), and then we are sitting at ~410 teams for 2023 thus far. Maybe we add another 40 teams…maybe we don’t.

Do we stay around 400 teams as FIM moves forward or do we grow back to pre-pandemic 550+?

Do these new teams start from old team numbers or does FIM offer the 6k rookie money to restart them and pump up numbers? If rookie money is still 4k first year and 2k second year, that could be the potential of ~900k going to new teams again. This is where I am advocating we don’t try to push for more FIM expansion again but rather to distribute these funds that could be going to new teams to existing teams to help sustain their program and grow. I admit that I am not sure if these funds come from FIM, state of michgian, and/or HQ but the logic applies to the funds regardless of the source. I am 110% not advocating that teams like mine get this money either. I would rather it go to programs who are less established, low income areas, etc. There are a million topics to discuss around how you could do something like that but I believe it is beneficial to talk about. None of this above accounts for the story I shared earlier of a group bringing multiple teams to a comp (Some rookie, some older) to compete as they share students from team to team, grab students who don’t actually want to drive, etc. Those programs maybe don’t need to have 10 teams but rather 4-5 would be better for them.

As to STEM/STEAM equity and inclusion, I disagree that FRC is the best foot we can place forward. Financially, FTC-VEX-FLL are all better for the goal of reaching more students if your goal is the largest blanket you can cast. Lots of the top programs in our state have amazing outreach in their neighboring communities when it comes to expanding these other programs to reach more students and engage them into STEAM. With more money going to existing teams like yours, maybe you could expand these more financially viabl programs into your community and reach more with your net.

As to being passed by other states/winning more, I think this is a product that comes with raising our level of competition and existing teams. I believe students may not have a goal of winning (or you) but when they do win, those moments are inspiring. Having almost 30% of our state below the 10opr threshhold from above can’t be inspiring to all of those students. Its hard for me to believe that providing more resources (money) and mentors to these existing teams we wouldn’t see positive returns in student retention, mentor retention, and team/program retention.

-Ronnie

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One thing I do think that could end up making some teams fold is still the effect covid had on many teams as far as the amount of students. We were running on almost all seniors last year, we still had a fair amount of kids that got one full competition season in before covid canceled the next 2 seasons and we didn’t keep any students that were freshman in 2020 because they just experienced the work but not competitions as a payoff. Then 2021 was completely remote and we weren’t allowed to meet or be able to recruit any new students. Then with everything uncertain at the beginning of the 2021-22 school year there was no club day to try and recruit new students, we still got a few but a much smaller class than we used to have. My team was worried about student count and the turn over leading to not having enough students to continue the team and I know of one team that this did happen to where the school and mentors agreed to competing last year for the seniors then dissolving the team due to lack of interest.

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I have no dog in this hunt, but this resonates with me. It’s got to be a far more effective use of your limited dollars to get these existing teams up to a level of execution where they generate enough of their own pride and enthusiasm to be a going concern. Spreading it thin on a bunch of new & reluctant teams just seems a recipe for a bunch of really disheartening churn.

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