The FIRST ® Championship registration fee is increasing for all FIRST programs for the 2024 season due to rising costs for many aspects associated with hosting a large-scale event. For FIRST ® Robotics Competition, the 2024 FIRST Championship event registration fee is $5,750.
Number of Teams at the Championship
We are reducing the number of FIRST Robotics Competition teams that will be at the FIRST Championship from 624 (the target we had for 2023) to 600. This change gives more space around the practice fields for human and robot movement and maintains our ability to offer teams 10 qualification matches.
2024 FIRST Championship Advancement
The growing number of FIRST Robotics Competition teams and Regional Events is also necessitating a change to FIRST Championship advancement. For 2024, Regional Events will advance 4 teams to the FIRST Championship. The teams automatically qualified will be the winners of the FIRST Impact Award and Engineering Inspiration Award and the Captain and First Pick of the winning alliance.
The Wild Card system will still be used, and the Second Pick of the winning alliance will be the first team in the order for receiving a Wild Card. We are also expanding the Wild Card list to include the teams from the 3rd and 4th place alliances.
If a winning alliance member (either the 2nd pick or the backup team) or Rookie All-Star winner does not receive a Wild Card, the team will be placed on the Priority Waitlist.
Full details on Regional Event advancement are available on the Championship Eligibility page. (This page will be updated soon with allocation for Districts. Those allocations are not done until after registration payment due date November 13.)
Waitlist registration for the 2024 FIRST Championship opens (today!) Thursday, October 26, at noon eastern.
It wasn’t so long ago that we sent 3 winning robots, the captain of the finalist alliance, impact, EI, and RAS to champs. I know we’re still recovering from COVID, but 4 slots per regional is incredibly disheartening. At least we’re not burning wildcards anymore.
EDIT: ($750 extra × 600 teams) - ($5000 reg fee × 24 teams) = $330,000. I’m very curious to hear where that 1/3rd of a million is going.
This is an incredibly frustrating rule change and it will have a clear negative impact on team growth in the regional system. Regional teams already have a difficult enough time qualifying for the Championship as compared to their district system counterparts. Removing the winning second pick team from automatic qualification is just a further indication of how out of touch HQ leadership is with the challenges of operating an FRC team in less densely populated areas.
Inequitable qualification criteria, plus the increased cost, combined with the continued use of Houston as a championship location putting many of our students at risk makes us seriously consider not attending the championship if we qualify.
Manchester must do better than this, or the program will continue to suffer.
So, 8 divisions… 24 fewer teams… carry the one… that’s 3 fewer teams per division.
All crowding problems solved. And I can hardly wait to get my hotel room blocks super quick and easy with this decrease in teams!
EDIT: I started a thread in Sept 2021 asking what people thought about attending three regionals, or two regionals and hope for champs as a third, big event. Maybe time to bring that discussion back…
Depending on the 24 teams left out this could range from 7 students per team to the insane 100+. So potentially somewhere between 84 - 1200 rooms did just open up. Assuming 2 per room to account for adult chaperones and mentors, even 3 per room is 56 - 800 rooms. That’s a couple floors in theory.
This is back of the napkin math. Super rough definitely.
Lower end
(7 x 24 ) / 2 or (7 x 24) / 3
Or upper end
(100 x 24) / 2 or (100 x 24) / 3
Either scenario assumes all 24 teams have the same number of rooms needed per team, and not many teams would send 100 students/mentors to worlds
I get it; I don’t like it and I disagree with it; but I get it.
That said, this makes that 8th seed captain a de facto kingmaker should they win their regional. The difference between a banner and champs vs a banner and no champs is basically a coin flip decision during alliance selection. That’s a tough position to be in.
My team is planning to attend 3 regionals this year in hopes of qualifying for champs. At least California usually ends up being a Wildcard Bonanza weeks 5 and 6.
Not a fan… I can just imagine a “mid rank” team finally winning a regional in early weeks after 10+yrs never getting to champs and not getting a wildcard… I could personally see that being a level of frustration that would haved discouraged me when I was a student from even wanting to continue in FRC… Despite never actually being in FRC to win events…
Still hate that the entire winning alliance doesn’t get to go to Champs automatically. Does not, will not make any sense.
Remove the financial reward for the Engineering Inspiration Award. Give it instead to the Rookie-All Star Award ($5,000 for a rookie team would probably go a long way), and remove the Engineering Inspiration award from the Championship eligibility criteria. Or swap it in the wildcard list with the winning Alliance 2nd pick.
It’s a fine award but teams that win the event should be given priority in my opinion.
The regional vs district dichotomy is one of the biggest inequalities facing the program today. Having spent near a decade in the regional system and now a few years in the district system, I truly cannot even begin to express how much easier it is to have a team with healthy performance related goals in the district system.
My students have asked me how regionals differ from our system; when I explain it, they immediately mention how stupid regionals sound.
I urge FIRST HQ to invest time into a complete overhaul of the regional qualification system.
IMO they should have just removed the waitlist entirely. Last year, 25 teams qualified off the priority waitlist from being either Founding and Sustaining, RAS, or open waitlist. Removing that would solve the capacity issue instead of hurting all regional teams.
