There have been several threads pop up lately about alternate locations for the World Championship event. Chicago and Indianapolis pop up frequently in these conversations, and since I grew up halfway between the two and currently live in Indianapolis, my interest was piqued. It would be really cool to showcase my city and show it’s more than another flyover town.
However, the more I look into it, the more headaches and hassles I see. My understanding is that local teams and area organizations would see no direct benefit to hosting an event beyond laying one’s head on one’s own pillow at night. There is no real data to suggest a proliferation of teams at a CMP site. There are no financial benefits, unless you’re a hotel or restaurant owner. In fact, your finances might be at odds with HQ - see the current situation BattleBots is waging with its teams and Discovery. You’re inviting traffic and congestion into your home.
So, what is the value in hosting a global event? Why would local folks invest their time, talents, and treasure into creating a bid for CMP? What could HQ do to make the situation more palatable?
From a city perspective? Same reason cities build convention centers in the first place. To attract an influx of what are essentially tourists. Driving business to hotels, restaurants, and shops in the area to serve the local economy.
This has the added benefit of acting as outreach for those businesses - after a champs event, I would imagine they all are well aware of FIRST and robotics, which gives local teams the opportunity for easier sponsorship - you don’t really have to sell the program to them, they’re already sold!
This is part of why I think Detroit/Ford Field was cheaper to break the contract they had with FIRST in hosting CMP than Houston.
It has been well known for a while that the Detroit Lions wanted to host the draft, and one of their prior bids for the draft was specifically declined because there were already events scheduled for the same month as the draft. Coincidentally, now that there is not a championship event in Detroit, they won their bid for the 2023 draft.
Realistically, the benefits for hosting Champs is the same as it is for hosting any other convention/large event. Same as the drawbacks. Cities that have something to prove to the general public are great locations for Championships, as they want to pump money into their local economies, and get more tourists so that the perception of the city will change. New Orleans post hurricane katrina is a good example of this. They rebuilt the city relatively quickly, however that took a lot of money and the rest of the country still saw it as a damaged city. They hosted a lot of conventions and it was cheap to book hotels and the venues were also cheap. I went to 3 conventions in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s there. On the other side, established convention cities have plenty of organizations fighting to get there already, and FIRST likely can’t compete very well with them.
Hosting Championships is not like hosting the super bowl. FIRST has to buy their way into getting a venue the same way any other trade show/exhibition event does.
There is a Ying and a Yang to this. No doubt First pays a lot to the facilities. Host cities pay a lot to First to host. One of the reasons Atlanta is not a host is their bid package was not as nice as others. Disclaimer: I am not a key player in any of this so what I know is second hand. The reason why a city is a host or not are many and varied.
DiscoBots (2587) are one of the handful of teams that operates inside of Houston inner loop. We have made the effort to attend championship in Houston every year regardless of qualification.
The students have enjoyed the conference and presentation sessions.
