So, one more to add to the collection of district maps, this time of the FIRST North Carolina District (FNC). The map is done by county with numbers of teams indicated on the map as well as on the key. The color coding is arbitrary and designed to give good contrast between different team population sizes.
Here are some of the important stats:
2024 Team Count = 75
2024 Rookie Teams = 9
Teams not Returning for 2024 = 5
Counties in District = 100
Counties with Teams = 33
Teams are mostly grouped in the more urban counties, with a particular focus around the Triangle area (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) and the counties of Wake, Durham, and Orange. There is a secondary concentration in the Charlotte area, focused on Mecklenburg and surrounding counties with an extension into the western counties, centered around Asheville in Buncombe county. As a result of this, there is a kind of east-west split to the district and the events, but with a lot of cross travel between areas. This can be seen in the event distribution shown on the map, with two events in the Triangle (Orange County and Wake County), two in the western counties (Mecklenburg County and UNC Asheville) and one in the southeast (UNC Pembroke). The DCMP, however, is in the east in Pitt county at ECU rather than being more centrally located, this being the only venue large enough to accommodate it that’s available at that time of year.
FNC still has a lot of room to grow and our district leadership is actively promoting FIRST in the more rural counties. This is aided by a state grant program for school districts to institute robotics programs in schools, something that our leadership lobbied for along with many of our teams.
I don’t have any info on why the five teams aren’t returning, not even rumors. Some are not so surprising (young or rookie teams) but one is very surprising indeed: 2655 The Flying Platypi. This is one of the oldest teams in FNC and one that has a long and storied history, having been to Worlds nine times since their first season (2008), winning Turing Division and going on to Einstein in 2018. It was a shock to see that they were not on the event lists for the coming season. They’re from Guilford county. The other non-returning teams are 6214 PHEnix (Pender county), 7715 Robo-Banditos (Pasquotank county), 8634 BOOTSTRAPS! (Halifax county), and 9296 TITANium (Pender county). While Pasquotank and Halifax are pretty rural counties, Guilford and Pender are not. The two Pender county teams are both from exurbs of Wilmington and the Platypi are from Greensboro, the largest of the Triad cities.
2655 lost some very strong core mentors after 2018-2019. My guess is that folks tried to keep things going in 22’ and 23’ they but didn’t find some new people to take on that heavy lifting mentorship role.
Hey everyone! 1533 co-captain here, we have shared our space with 2655 for a couple years now.
They sadly are shutting down because of lack of members and mentors. We’re holding onto their stuff for now, and hope to help them get back together in the next couple years.
They had a great history, (including their turing win w us in 2018) and hopefully they can get back together asap.
@wgorgen Can you provide any insights into why they lost members and mentors? I’ve just seen the tail end of it.
Several mentors for 2655 left the team in 2019. Then, with all the challenges of the 2020&21 seasons, I think they lost a lot of students and even more of the mentors. Since the team was mostly homeschool student, it was challenging to recruit new students during the dark days of Covid.
Probably the biggest challenge that contributed to the fade out of 2655 was build space access. 2655 was using an area of a shop at a TE building for the 2019 season (we were sharing that space with them after we lost our shop space at J A King). But the Guilford County fire marshal was not willing to allow TE to continue to host the teams (he considered the activity to be educational rather than hobby/extracurricular, and the building was not permitted for educational activities). Shortly after leaving the TE facility we found another space and 2655 was able to join us there for the 2020 season. Unfortunately Matthews Specialty Vehicles bought that building in early 2020 and needed to use the space for their business. 1533 ended up moving back to our small building that we share with the 4 FTC teams in our club known as TSL - Triple Strange Lair. 2655 tried to operate out of a mentor’s garage, but in 2022 they moved into TSL with us. However, TSL is barely big enough for FTC to operate effectively and cramming 2 FRC teams into that small space was difficult.
When 2655 was a rookie team, 1533 mentored them and helped them get started. We still have a strong bond with the remaining adult leadership and we hope to be able to help them to return to active status in a future season.
