The initial $5,000 registration fee still goes to FIRST, not the district (but some portion of that does come back to the district, not sure on the exact amount). However, third (and more) play fees [strike]as well as DCMP fees (I’m pretty sure)[/strike] do go to the district.
As part of one FRC team registration fee, FRC teams in the geographically defined area will receive one FRC Kit of Parts (KoP) and be eligible to compete at two District Events with approximately twelve (12) matches per district event. FIRST will collect additional play fees as necessary to fill capacity at District Events and forward the entire additional play fee to the District Leadership Entity.
Just the third play and any interdistrict plays fees in that District go to the not-for-profit that runs the district. Depending on how many third plays you have it could be a substantial amount of money, maybe enough to cover the cost of a district event.
Rahul, I think you’ve done a good thing and handled the situation well and hopefully we’ll all be able to look back in a couple of year at this as the start of a change in Minnesota.
$5,000 initial team registration (that allows for two district plays) goes to HQ, with $1,000 per team coming back to the district area.
All of the $4,000 registration for the District Championship event goes to HQ and not the district area.
$1,000 registration for third district play (that happen within that district area) goes to the district area, even if the team playing an extra event is from a different district area. (So when a team from Michigan plays in Indiana, IndianaFIRST receives the $1,000).
Another question to answer: What will be done with the teams that can’t afford (or aren’t allowed) to travel for an event? Multiple teams in the Twin Cities area fit this description, and wouldn’t be able to do a second event.
That already happens in other areas and can be largely unavoidable unless you utilize advantages of the district system like run two local Saturday/Sunday events.
Questions like this have already been answered in other regions to varying degrees of success and it is up to the environment the would-be leadership operates in and the action they want to take to address varying types and levels of adversity in the system.
Not all district systems are created equal but they all deal with similar challenges. The road has been paved but it is not the road’s responsibility to buy the car or pump the gas.
I’m surprised about how the RPC didn’t promote the mentor roundtable, yet expected mentors to show up. I was there all 3 days and didn’t hear anything about this. If you hold a mentor roundtable, you need to promote it like crazy and get a majority of the mentors there. Maybe something at the state championship would be a better place to have the discussion, which it sounds like it may be happening.
I was also wondering why they got all taken down as well, as I glanced at it on Thursday but wanted to take a look at the cost on Friday. I was a bit discouraged looking at your flier about how you said that “These spots would be guaranteed to go to MN teams instead of Iowa or Wisconsin teams.” I hope you know that 4 of the 11 Iowa FRC teams (almost half) attended the Minneapolis regionals this past weekend. That being said, I think it is a good thing to have districts to make it less expensive for everyone participating and potentially grow the program. They could be located closer to teams encouraging them to promote it within their local communities to bring their fans out. The architecture of districts is best for states with high saturations of teams and making it much lower key than regional events.
I can’t imagine, out of the 10-12 events required in MN, that there wouldn’t be more than two events within an hour’s drive of the Cities. If I remember correctly it’s about half of all MN FRC teams that are based in the Twin Cities or surrounding suburbs. There are a LOT of high schools, community colleges, and universities in the Twin Cities area which could be approached. Some of those high schools already host off season events or Week Zero events.
As its been pointed out it shouldn’t be a problem with where most teams in MN are located. Typically districts pop up within 15 minutes of previous events with more in between. We used to have three regionals within an hour of us and now we have five districts in that same vicinity.
Districts and travel are more an issue for rural teams. In New England it causes problems for teams from Northern New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine who might have one event they can drive to (less than an hour commute) and then have to travel to their second event. If they move on to the District Championship they typically have to travel however most of the region has to as well depending on how large your district is.
I just wanted to address this point specifically - sorry it took so long, but with everyone suffering from “event hangover”, tracking down details takes a while. No one on the RPC (myself included) issued any instructions to take down the flyers. It seems that the facilities people at the U of MN took them down as they weren’t “event relevant”. All those other flyers you mention they did see as event relevant - from what I saw at the event, they were all safety posters and posters related to the SWEet Eats event on Friday. Personally, I never even saw the flyers - one was never handed to me, I never saw any posted anywhere at North Star, the facilities people must have gotten to them beforehand.
I do remember hearing an announcement in the pits about it once. Just once. I may have missed any others because it was so loud in there, but they did announce it at least one time. I don’t know if they announced it in the arena or not.
Brendan,
MN is mostly rural. Minneapolis/St/ Paul is the largest with Rochester, Bloomington (actually a Cities suburb) and Duluth being the largest cities.
Minnesota is actually larger than Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine combined. To give you an idea, one team that attended Duluth is three hours north near the Canadian border. Another is in International Falls and two near Bemidji. All are about three hours drive on two lane roads. Much longer when weather is bad. My neice took about 5 hours to travel that distance to attend Duluth in snow.
There have been attempts to get a regional in Rochester or nearby.
Yes, I heard you talking with her, but I was a bit busy and didn’t actually see the flyer. I know after you left she mentioned that she wasn’t really terribly interested in districts, but I didn’t have time to stick around for any further discussion.
Anybody who thinks districts are bad either doesn’t understand them, doesn’t want to put in the effort for a better system, or in some way gets unfair personal gain from the regional system that they don’t want to give up. Anybody in this thread arguing against Knufire is no exception to this.
If you feel you don’t fit this bill, then show me your progress on the effort you’ve put forth into transitioning your area to the district system. Everybody knows it’s a multi-year process, but you can’t claim it’s a challenge better saved for a later date if you haven’t even started working towards it yet.
The best time to start considerations on how to transition your area into a district system is yesterday. The second best time is today.
I’ve been told that 80 of the teams in MN are from the cities and the surrounding suburbs. That leaves the majority of the teams from anywhere from international falls to Albert Lea. There will be travel involved for most teams. But likely one event would be close to their geographic area… So they’d be traveling to one event (which is what they do now).
A quick geographic study of team locations and placing “events” in various areas could tell you pretty quickly the impact of districts to team travel. We did this for California a few years ago.
