With teams attending multiple regional competitions, some teams have adopted a phrase called their “home” regional. As their “home” these teams specifically make it a point to shine their best there as well as to take part across the world at new and rising events. This said, where does your team submit their Chairman’s award and why? Do you submit at your home regional? Why or why not? What goes into the thought process when you apply? What makes a team choose one regional over another to submit?
I don’t pretend to know all the thought that goes into where Cyber Blue submits, but we submitted ours this year at the Boilermaker Regional up at Purdue. And I know one thought behind that decision is that judges from this area are gonna see the magnitude of things that our team does in Indiana better than judges out in California. They are gonna see why one act is so influential in a way that somebody that is not familiar with the region probably is not going to understand. That is one reason I think that the National Chairman’s Award can be quite tough besides the simple fact that the competition is on such a higher level than at a regional.
Team 612 consider NASA/VCU Regional as our home regional mainly because it’s close to home 
… and that is as true as it gets.
As for RCA, we apply to test how well we have done in past years as a FIRST team and how much further we can push ourselves, towards perfection. With this spirit we also believe to challenge ourselves, and apply to a new regional every single year. Honestly speaking, we want to go against different teams from different areas and see how well we can do.
So far we have won at Chesapeake (2006), NASA/VCU (2007) and Buckeyes (2008). For 2009…who knows…Florida? NYC? Pittsburgh? Hawaii?
-Imad
We originally were planning to enter at VCU, however, with the NASA grant, we entered the Hawaii regional instead.
The closest thing we received there was the entrepreneurship award instead.