Districts and the ability for teams to improve

FIRST General Forum
#61

Ontario person here.

Like many others have said, the main advantage of Districts is the ability to improve. Last year, we won the RAS, made it to Worlds, and… I’m going to be honest, we didn’t do so well at Worlds. We essentially got two competitions and 20 matches under our belt.

This year, having unbag time was really useful, as well as having two events. Even though we were 24th pick at our first event, and would have qualified to CMP in a regional system, we would have had a mediocre robot. We built several improvements to our robot in the 6-hour unbag time, and improved our record (and robot) at our second event. With these matches ALONE, we were able to get 24 matches.

Thanks to two awards, we were able to qualify for Provincial Champs, where we’ll get another 12 matches. In my opinion, addressing the OP’s point, I think the advantage of the district system significantly allows a team to improve during the course of a season. Yes, the best teams will always qualify to CMP. It’s the question of how to determine the next best who qualify, and I think districts does a better job of that.

#62

I sure hope there are more seats than what I see so far in the construction time lapse at SVSU:

Looks like maybe 3500 seats to me. :eek:

#63

That sure does look small. Considering each field should expect typical district event capacity for spectators, I was thinking that is going to create a lot of standing or very friendly people watching matches.

Edit: just looked it up - 3932 seats available total. FiM asks for 1200 minimum to host a 40 team district event.

#64

One thing I’d love to see is to make the District Championships feel more like a mini-World Championship. It sounds like FIM is already well on their way. For example, one of the great things about World Championships outside of the actual games are the seminars and workshops. I don’t know how feasible it would be to introduce workshops and seminars at a District level (obviously it would depend on the saturation and expertise available for any given district) but that would offer really cool learning opportunities to students and mentors alike.

We already use events as informal networking and learning opportunities, it would be neat if they could offer more formal ones.

#65

Wikipedia says:

James E. O’Neill Arena, the flagship facility of the complex and a 3,932-seat indoor arena used for basketball; it can seat up to 4,932 for concerts and features 11,284 square feet (1,048 m2) of space.

But the SVSU site says:

The seating capacity was decreased to 3,500, which makes for a more intimate atmosphere during game day.

#66

Slightly OT, but I think the end game for FIRST is to have district championships that feed super regionals that feed worlds.

I think that it’s likely that a “small” (160-200 team) event with divisions becomes the world championship within the next 10 years, with the big events being the super regionals (north super regional in Detroit, south super regional in Houston).

FIRST’s goal is to get more people to go to these large events because they are undoubtably inspiring to students. The above plan gets more students to experience what we call right now the “worlds experience”, but it also still preserves the competition aspect of it.

However, I’d guess that FIRST hasn’t figured out the logistics, or the density required to have the above plan be successful, which is why we haven’t seen it put into place yet.

#67

Guess those teams that used to regularly go to worlds should step up their game and earn an invite to Champs :]

Districts qualify the teams that truly deserve to go. It does a decent job of sending your best representatives to champs from what I’ve seen thanks to the points system. I still think the World Championship(s) should be the best of the best competing so I don’t have an issue with this.

#68

I, respectfully, disagree.

I come from a community team in Michigan (2959) and I spent four years in the FiM structure, before coming to Indiana.

My experience is that districts help teams flourish. It allows us to compete at multiple competitions for a small chunk of the price it cost to compete at multiple regionals. I wish I had a video, but at P-M, there was a segment before alliance selection used to talk about the positive impact of districts.

The district structure makes it so my team can compete multiple times, make friends on other teams, and get to know the volunteers. It gives us underdogs a chance to go to Champs and a chance to win blue banners, like never before.

The district structure, combined with the help of the government in Michigan, skyrocketed growth in that state. I think we should take some notes out of Michigan’s playbook so we can accomplish Jason’s 80 by 20.

#69

Huh. Something’s odd here.

Ontario has 147 teams and 29 slots (20%).
PNW has 155 teams and 39 slots (25%).

I wonder why such a large difference?

I searched for a table showing the number of teams and Championship slots for all the districts, but couldn’t find one, so I looked up the individual figures and came up with this:

http://i.imgur.com/iHXMhOm.png

(Number of teams came from the District Ranking tables at http://frc-districtrankings.firstinspires.org/ and number of slots came from https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc/blog/2017-cmp-district-allocations . This listed 145 Ontario teams rather than 147.)

(Had to make it an image to get it to format as a table. I wish this forum had an “insert table” option!)

#70

Houston CMP is not in demand. STL CMP is. Far more teams (by percentage) are closer to STL, and more teams have STL as their “home CMP”. FIRST had to reduce the qualifying percentages for districts qualifying to STL.

This is also why so many more Waitlist spots are being offered to Houston CMP.

This is also why Houston CMP will be much less competitive than STL CMP.

-Mike

#71