Here’s some data about Round 1 of Event Preferencing that I found interesting, and I thought you might as well.
3,300 teams submitted preferences during Round 1. This includes 216 rookie teams! (Last season, 3,084 teams, including 199 rookies, submitted preferences during Round 1.)
Those 3,300 teams submitted preferences for 5,762 events.
The Lake Superior Regional had the most teams (92) submit it as a preference.
The New England District WPI Event was the district event with the most preferences with 73 teams selecting it.
1,832 teams submitted a preference for only one event, and the most event preferences submitted by one team was 12. Here’s the full breakdown of Event Preferences:
Table that was in the blog but doesn’t format well in a block quote:
Not surprising. There’s no north shore or south shore events this year, so all those teams need to go somewhere, and WPI is fairly close and is always good
The NE schedule made it hard for teams to avoid overnight trips and not play back to back weekends. We assumed (correctly) wpi being week 4 and the elimination of 2 MA events would make it the most in demand event.
We’ve been on both sides in recent years and we prioritized Lake Superior over Northern Lights this year mostly because it offers a better team experience. The pits are much less cramped and not next to those big (AND COLD) load in doors, and you’re right next to the practice field. When both events generally have a mix of competitive teams, and roughly the same number of overall teams, it makes a lot of sense personally why LS would be favored over NL.
From the point of view of someone who has never been Lake Superior filling before Northern Lights makes sense as it is listed first on the dashboard. So assuming most teams who selected one selected both it probably got listed as the higher priority.
Also the blog post only stated that 92 teams had it as a preference. Since between the two events there are 76 teams it wouldn’t surprise me if 16 teams just had it on the list but at a lower priority than where they wound up.
However after reading what Allison said above me, if I had the above information I would probably also only put Lake Superior on my list for the better experience and just hope the wait-list wasn’t 20 teams deep. (I also forwarded her message to 2383 to let them know to prepare for it to be cold inside the pits as well as outside)
You are absolutely correct that the pits on Lake Superior are roomier. With the current location of the practice field most pits in Nothern Lights aren’t much farther away. I may be able to do something about traffic flow that will improve that. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around how they crammed 60 teams into that hall.
As for the breeze, the construction behind the DECC is supposed to be done in the next few weeks so load in and load out won’t be exclusively done on the north side of the building and we’ll go back to the big overhead door in Lake Superior being open too.
Not us .
But we will probably have 12 in the unlimited round, looking for events to participate in.
The most shocking to me was Taiwan. They reserved ALL of the spots. Zero openings during Round 1 available.
While we didn’t have issues with the pits in NL this year as we got luckier with our pit location. In 2023 we had a pit against a wall. We quickly found out that our pit area was not a true 101010 due to a section along the wall that extended out. Later in the competition we found that there was also a slow leak (drop every 5 or so minutes
iirc) in our pit that would appear for a few hours after lunch. I’m guessing it was from a dishwasher or something. We didn’t hear anything of the leak in 2024 so hopefully it was fixed.
But, this does add to some of the issues with the pits in NL vs LS.
I will also admit to not having competed at LS however I did walk through the pits so I think that counts for something.
It would be interesting to see the data of the other NE events to see what other events have a lot of teams, I wouldn’t be surprised if Revere isn’t too far behind for similar reasons.
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