While watching Top 25 last night they brought up the point that many regional competition only offer 8 qualification plays per team. In Minnesota we have 208 teams, and a vast majority of those teams only get one event a year.
I see 2 major issues with this:
-This make the $5000 it costs to register for events pretty crazy, $625 a match isn’t appealing for many of the low budget teams around FIRST.
-This also leaves the teams that do qualify for champs hugely unprepared. Most MN teams at champs will have ~20 plays, versus district teams that will have 40+ plays. EDIT: Many teams come into champs with 80+ plays
There definitely isn’t a great solution to this problem, other than going to districts, but that has been addressed in the past.
I have a feeling that Minnesota or the upper Midwest (MN, WI, IA, ND and/or SD) will become the next district within the next few years. We already have four regionals, two in Duluth and two in the twin cities, plus a regional in Iowa.
This is becoming much more common, I know of at least 10 practice bots and 5+ practice fields all around the state. I can’t imagine more than about 25 teams make second robots.
40… Thats almost the min that most district teams will have. We aren’t normal so coming into CMP with 100+ matches isn’t common, but coming in with 60-80 is fairly easy to do in districts.
So no, it’s a disadvantage to the teams coming into teams with only 14 matches (8 QM + 6 EM). It’s also a stupid high cost per match.
It’s also a big issue because the ranking algorithm gets more accurate the longer it can run.
I am under the understanding that all 4 MN events will only be 8 matches per team. Looking at other regionals I think you are correct, the 2 I checked had 9 matches per team.
I’d love to go to districts which would solve this problem. The issue is with key volunteers. Minnesota would have to do 12 events which is a lot of field setup/teardowns, and a lot more work for our key volunteers. I know our Volunteer Coordinator is crazy busy as is with 4 (5 if you count Iowa) events. We do have a great crop of college level volunteers on the way. When some of us start transferring into key volunteer positions, we’ll be ready for the move to districts. Which will solve the problems.
A band-aid solution will be adding another regional which could happen within a year or two. This will allow more teams to do 2 events. The cost will still be crazy, but at least the opportunity will be there.
All we can do to help is recruit more volunteers, and get them trained into key volunteer positions!
It’s all dependent on the number of teams registered.
Northern Lights at 60 teams could have snuck in 9 per team, but Lake Superior at 63 teams could not. We have the same problem in Minneapolis, so I would expect both events to stick to 8 again.
I also take issue with dividing the $5,000 up by the number of matches and valuing the competition on a per-match basis.
First, the $5,000 is your ticket into both your first event and the season as a whole. How much is the rest of the FRC season worth to you? Is build season worth $0? The KOP? Of course this “value” will be the same between both, but just saying that a regional costs $625/match doesn’t take that into account.
A regional also comes with a lot of other differences- bigger venue, more teams, more money spent on the A/V setup, etc. How much are those things worth to you and your team?
Now if you really do just want to compare on a cost-per-match basis, I won’t argue that districts are a better “deal.” And yes, district teams do come into championships with more plays as well. I just don’t personally believe it is quite that simple.
The number of qualification matches is highly dependent on the number of teams at an event (fewer teams means more matches per team) and the cycle time between matches. With the defenses this year, cycle time is up compared to some other years. Last year MN events had 9 matches per team, and in 2014 (with practically no items for field reset to have to place) we got 10.
I know, I want more plays for my team… But I also know that there are challenges associated with switching to districts. Everyone involved is determined to provide the best experience for teams each year, and from what I’ve heard and seen, MN has some of the best events around :). After all, who else could get an Air Force Flight Simulator ride running for everyone to enjoy at their event like we had in Duluth?
And I want to give a big shout out to the crew from Bison Robotics at NDSU… 29 (i think) of them made the trek all the way across the state to volunteer in Duluth, and a similar number are signed up for the Minneapolis events in week 6 as well. Wow!
So, how much of my registration fee is a flight simulator ride worth? If we didn’t have it, could we have more matches?
I’m being snarky of course. But my point is, at it’s core this is a ROBOTICS COMPETITION. It’s cool to have other things but at the end of the day $625 a match is a tough pill to swallow.
And, look, I get you and I value different things in events but I would like to think that we could agree on the fact that 8 matches is unacceptable and I’d rather go to an event that gives me more matches than the self proclaimed “best events in FRC”.
You are totally right, I was more so looking at it as the cost per match as a second event. This obviously doesn’t apply to most teams. That first $5000 is very worth it for all that it gets you, but the second $5000 is much harder to validate.
I think that 8 qualification matches is too few, no question about it.
Fact is that MN should have joined the district system years ago. Every year that passes it gets far harder to implement.
I’ve heard the cries that you don’t have enough volunteers but that will never get better unless the move is made to the district system sooner rather than later.
At this point it is still possible to make it work with 2 events per weekend. Once you cross that 240 team count then it will require 3 matches on at least one weekend and then it does almost become impossible to implement the district system.
Yes MI has more than 2 events per weekend, however they did not start out that way, they had time to build up the resources, whether we are talking about volunteers, funding or equipment.
At this rate I fear that the teams in MN will be the last to benefit from all of the advantages of the District System, and I fear it is going to take a mandate from FIRST which I don’t think that will turn out all that well.
At the peachtree regional in 2015, there were 66 teams, and 8 matches per team.
I did some quick calculations that year and assuming you spent $5000 on registration, and “only” $4000 on the rest of the season (Including shipping, robot parts, tools, etc) you were spending about $500 a minute for field time.
To put that in perspective: For $9000 you get less than an hour on the field. Actually, you get less than half an hour on the field.
I don’t know of many things in life that cost $18000/hr, but apparently FRC is one of them.
Of course, those numbers don’t count the mentors time-donations. If you value your mentors at a low number, even $15/hr…you don’t want to know the price then…
I’m glad Georgia switched to districts.
Edit: Obviously this was a bit facetious. You can’t say that the only thing about FRC is competing on the field. But it does show how little playtime you get, and at what cost.
Apart from a pile of disjointed small events in high school gyms and marginally more matches per team, what are “All the advantages” of moving to a district system?
About the only disappointing thing about the DECCer FRC event this past weekend was only 8 matches.
We were just joking about the $$/qualification match and how it was just way too expensive.
Champs in Atlanta used to be pretty bad also with 7 matches only in Quals.
Even if you only get 8 matches per district event, you still get two district events. That’s twice as many, and in reality you probably get closer to 9 or 10 matches per event.
Plus there are also district champs, which is another set of matches. Meaning if a team wins district champs and goes to the actual champs, they have 3 times the amount of field time/driver practice under their belt as a team who only went to a regional.