Have you ever tried to explain to someone, just how large an FRC Championship is? It is hard find the words to convey how much space it fills, and how many people attend/participate.
Here is a high speed “walking tour” (1 minute) covering the entire layout of fields and pits at the 2019 Houston Championship.
Here are a few photos of Championships in St Louis and Houston.
Now imagine if both events were combined and all of the fields were in a separate venue the size of a football stadium and connected to the convention center where the pits are?
Something like that would be unfathomable.
And double the volunteers, and space, and a pony…
For people who have been to champs, your response is “Yeah, that’s champs. There’s a lot of teams. It’s big”
For people who have never been to champs before, you’ve captured the huge-ness of the event pretty well here. 6 competitions and 400 teams under one roof takes up a ton of space. Even more when it was 8 competitions and 600 teams in St. Louis. It’s been fun watching my rookie students for the past two years be amazed by the difference in scale between our 45 team DCMP and the 400 team CMP.
And keep in mind, this was just inside the main hall. In the same building there’s also 2 FTC divisions, an FLL competition and JrFLL exhibition, innovation fair, reception area, volunteer lounge, and a bunch of other places all full with FIRST people. You can’t really imagine the scale of it until you see it in person.
P.S. - not to turn this into a Houston vs Detroit argument, but I’ve been to both now and the layout in Detroit is a lot easier to navigate. The fields and pits are in two parallel lines so that each division’s field is right next to their pit. So even though the room is just as big, you only need to walk the whole length to enter/exit not each time you want to go between the pits and fields.
For Nostalgia:
The last full champs in a Dome
8 Divisions x ~76 teams = 609 teams
Georgia Dome 2010
4 Divisions x 86 teams = 344 teams
The long walk from the pits to the field and back at the Georgia Dome.
(~15 minute video, but that was a long distance to the fields from the pits)
One positive of 2Champs is that the pits are located near the play fields.
Trying to think of other positives…
Watching the video, with that perspective, does make it seem “bigger” than it does in person after having gone many times. Good job. (I kept looking to see if I was in any of those time lapse shots… I wasn’t)
Just to slightly correct, this was the walk at St Louis, not the Georgia Dome.
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