District Allocations, Rookie All-Star, and FIRST Championship Open Waitlist
Written by Frank Merrick, Director FIRST Robotics Competition
District Allocations
We have determined the number of slots Districts will get at FIRST Championship, and Districts have determined the number of Chairman’s Awards, Dean’s List Finalists, Engineering Inspiration Awards, and Rookie All-Star Awards they will be recognizing at their District Championships. See the updated FIRST Championship Eligibility page for details.
Rookie All-Star
It’s important to note that Rookie All-Star awards are optional at every event, as indicated in the Rookie All-Star Award description. Some Districts and Regionals have only one team eligible for rookie awards this year. These teams still need to meet the guidelines to be selected for the award. So, as an example while a District may indicate they would like to present a Rookie All-Star award at their Championship, this is only a plan, not a guarantee.
FIRST Championship Open Waitlist
The open waitlist for FIRST Championship is now available to all teams (including rookies this year!). Teams can sign up through the FIRST Dashboard, and instructions for how to sign up are at the bottom of the FIRST Championship Eligibility page. It’s important to remember that we will only draw teams from the open waitlist if the priority waitlist has been exhausted. We don’t know yet if we will be exhausting the priority waitlist. Much will depend on team acceptance rate of FIRST Championship slots. However, it costs teams nothing to put their names on the open waitlist, so if you are interested, please do so!
Season’s Greetings, Safe Holidays, and Happy New Year!
The ratios for District Award qualifying seem a little odd. There is some rounding happening which seems fine like Texas sending 4 Dean’s List Finalists from their 21 Championship District Teams for a ratio of 5.25 and rounding that up to 6:1 as the criteria say.
Others like MI only sending 3 CA teams which is 20.333:1 when the min ratio is supposed to be 18:1 seems odd. Also, Ontario is qualifying 5 Dean’s List Finalists for their 16 Championship teams for a 3.2:1 ratio and the max ratio is listed as 6:1.
Here I was thinking I was doing the math wrong for Ontario allocations. Couldn’t for the life of me make the numbers add up based on the max/min ratios FIRST claims to be following.
Ontario Dean’s List looks like a typo and is likely to be changed
The rest of them for the max ratio Districts can do ceiling so CHS CA is sending 16/9 which is 1.777 which you can round up to 2. For the min ratio Districts can do Floor so MI CA is sending 61/18 which is 3.388 which you can round down to 3.
For those who don’t want to click the link here is the breakdown of district award allocations
District
Allocated FIRST Championship Slots
Chairman’s Award Winners
Dean’s List Finalists
Engineering Inspiration Award Winners
Rookie All-Star Award Winners
FIRST Chesapeake
16
2
3
2
1
FIRST in Michigan
61
3
10
1
1
FIRST Mid-Atlantic
18
2
2
2
1
FIRST Indiana Robotics
8
1
2
2
1
NE FIRST
25
3
4
2
1
Ontario
16
2
3
1
1
FIRST in Texas
21
2
4
2
2
FIRST Israel
9
1
2
1
1
FIRST North Carolina
10
1
2
2
1
Pacific Northwest
18
2
3
1
1
Peachtree
9
1
2
2
1
So it looks like after removing award winners and the 3 DC winners we get the following number of teams qualifying based on points:
Chesapeake - 8
Michigan - 53
Mid-Atlantic - 10
Indiana - 1
NE - 16
Ontario - 9
Texas - 12
Israel - 3
North Carolina - 3
PNW - 11
Peach Tree - 2
Good news unless I missed it, Hall of Fame and Regional Winners do not take up one of these slots, like they did in previous years.
FiM has pretty much always sent the least amount of DCCA winners that FIRST allows to Championship. From what I have heard, their philosophy was always to have as many of the best robots the state has to offer to represent them at Worlds, especially since only 1 DCCA team could win at Championship anyway.
If I was one of the smaller districts that will barely have any points slots advancing this year I would probably want to do the same.
The eight teams Indiana sends to CMP are likely to have at least twice the playing time that teams sent from a Regional would have. They’ll all be serious competitors in their CMP divisions.
Indiana - 1 non-winning merit qualifier. It feels like a very steep hill to qualify from here. Looking at the list of long established, excellent teams, it is really easy to count more than 8.
It’s been that way since the start of districts there. There’s a reason there’s virtually always at least one FIN team at IRI who didn’t qualify for Championship–they’re IRI Good™, they just get hosed on the tiny number of slots.
PCH is a similar situation except we have 2 open slots. Maybe that was why First went to 1/2 champs. Imagine a normal situation when you have pre-qualified from previous year champs.
Yes, I was commenting on the qualification squeeze there (not the team quality). It’s going to be like Las Vegas in 2017 when teams like 987 were eliminated in the semis.
Indiana’s 15.1% championship rate looks pretty good compared to the large regionals where as few as 6.6% of teams will advance.
Edit: Indiana has 53 teams, which is a pretty typical regional size. If Indiana did 2 regionals instead of districts, they would advanced 8 teams (plus any wild cards). I don’t think their allocation seems that out of line.
