I Was curious. When you win nattionals, do you get to come back to nationals each year for no cost?
No you have to pay.
You just automatically qualify for life.
I thought it was just qualify for next season. Qualifying for life must be nice. Then all your future rookie members would get to enjoy Nats then.
Yes.
Actually our team qualfies for the championship twice because we are also an original FIRST team (there are only 6 remaining).
Since you’re qualified twice, but can only physically go once, does that mean you get twice the pit size.
Btw: I thought that 191 won Chairman’s twice…so doesn’t that get you 3 invites?
If I may add a thought or two to this, I also think that being a part of the history of FIRST like Team 191 is places responsibility on those team members to carry that honor, intentionally or not. We ask a lot of all of our FIRST teams to represent ourselves, our schools, and FIRST well, using Gracious Professionalism to help us motivate and encourage students, mentors, and sponsors to participate in the FIRST program. The founding teams understand this very very well and we appreciate them - they are very special to all of us.
This may become important down the road, as more schools join FIRST, there will be more and more teams who want to go to the big dance. I can forsee in the future that only teams who qualify for nationals through whatever means will only be eligible to go.
Nowadays it seems to be about who can afford to go as much as it does about qualifying. It cost a pretty penny to go.
Well, it’s not guaranteed that they will always be eligible for the Championship (the criteria change every year). But I don’t see FIRST removing the Hall of Fame eligibility anytime soon (logically though, eventually they will be forced to as FIRST and the Hall of Fame grows in size).
I have a feeling that if FIRST grows too large, they’ll start going to a 3-tier competition system, with local, regional, and championship. Rather than having a bunch of regionals, they’d probably have about 10, and call the rest local competitions.
Entirely speculation. Maybe they’ll just have a HUGE championship event. Or maybe championships will be hard to get into.
There is still a lot of work that needs to be done in order to achieve that spot.
No one can deny the fact that FIRST is growing.
But at the same time FIRST is adding more and more regionals to accomodate Teams. States with more teams happen to have two or more regionals. Correct me if i’m wrong, but Michigan has three regionals.
Every year, FIRST add one or two regionals to the list. If worst come to worst, i’d say we’ll have a regionals in every county (on a second thought thats really not worse)
Imad
With 350-400 slots available at the Championship, it will be a long time before Chairman’s teams fill up the event. I am not going to worry about it.
…And don’t forget that California has 4