I was wondering if anybody in the Kansas City area happens to know if the K.C. Regionals were going to be back at the MCC Business & Technology Campus in 2019?
MCC seems to be out next year. PM sent.
Any word on where any KC events may be held instead?
Also, any word on which weeks they will be? My understanding is that OKC and Rock City will both be on week 2, and Texas is now off the table unless you are from Texas.
MCC is indeed out for 2019. They are remodeling/expanding and the exhibit hall will no longer be available.
I don’t think anything has been finalized yet, but last I heard, we were trying to make sure to spread out the regionals, so that we wouldn’t have multiple events on back to back weekends. They will be held in high schools, most likely. Again, nothing finalized.
Supposedly there’s going to be 3 smaller events, so it’s possible that at least 1 regional won’t be at the same time as OKC.
They just went from 1 regional to 2. Makes me wonder why that would be done knowing of the changes coming this year.
3 smaller events? Could we have districts coming to Missouri/Kansas in a couple of years?
I doubt it, unless they can work around FIRST’s state border policy and figure out where to draw the district borders, considering that St. Louis is a place. (Maybe let the teams decide, but that’s for another thread)
There are currently a few hiccups in trying to reason out a district model for Missouri and Kansas and I pretty sure there has been a thread on this somewhere.
The point of moving to two events this year was so that all the local teams would be guaranteed to compete locally if they wanted to. We have/had something close to 65 teams that would call the KC regional there home regional and only room for about 60 of those teams. Also there was always interest from out of state teams to come and play but due to the large number of local teams there just wasn’t much room for them to come and play.
The reason for moving to three smaller events, in addition to the fact that the BTC will be unavailable, is to try and keep the capacity for the same numbers of teams that we had last year but then also try and give each team a larger number of matches. This 3 regional format will also allow teams from the Kansas City area who don’t have the resources to travel to attend more than 1 regional and not necessarily have to go back to back.
I don’t know how everything will shake out, but I’d like to see 3 events spaced out rather than back-to-back-to-back. Being that the venues are schools, I figure they will have to work around schedules. Spring break weeks make a lot of sense for that reason, particularly with a regional not being a district event.
Now, I personally liked having a Fri-Sun event, and maybe that will be the case with the smaller venues, which makes some more dates (inservice) possible.
Exploring times schools in KC metro have spring break, I think the first event will be Week 2 (March 8-10) on the Kansas side. Then if you stuck with spring breaks you’d have a Week 3 and Week 4 event. The Week 4 would be in Missouri (when most have spring break).
My preference would be for it to be a Weeks 2, 4, and 6, but I could see it being 2, 3, 4.
Now another factor is the playing field. I don’t know whether KC will just have a field to ourselves, or whether it will play in later/earlier weeks somewhere else. If you have 234, you could share with other regions vs. 246.
Is this confirmed? If so, I’m hyped for a regional version of CowTown.
It can be difficult for some schools to have the room for very many teams. It might be a little smaller number of teams if we go to three regionals. I know Lee’s Summit, Sedalia and Wentzville can handle the field size for a small number of teams, but it can get a little difficult with school functions unless it is on spring break.
Mom is that you?
In addition to what the other (and much better looking) Scott said, finding a venue that meets all of FIRST’s requirements and is within an acceptable budget, is harder than it sounds. There aren’t many in the KC Metro that can support a larger (48+ team) event. And those that are large enough, are ridiculously priced.
Why couldn’t we share with other regions if we played in KC weeks 2, 4, and 6?
There are only so many playing fields. It is highly likely that the field would travel elsewhere for at least some of weeks 1, 3, 5, 7+
I am wondering if there are other areas are in the same situation.
I agree. I have heard the same thing about having a hard time finding locations.
I didn’t respond back earlier but my assumptions about travel/setup times was wrong. The freight cost isn’t prohibitive.
That’s frustrating. Sounds like stuff out of their control because I’ve figured pretty much that they were settled with the locations earlier when you think about how dates line up with school breaks and other details, including rumors I’ve heard about locations. As far as I’m aware, Paola would still be supportive of holding an event at our two gyms and has at least made that known to the regional committee when they toured a couple years back. However, I think our break being week 3 along with other issues (being better suited to a district event over a regional, for one), make that unlikely this year.
The work they do is monumental and I’m rooting for them to get to a solution and be able to wrap up the details for this season (and then make it happen with all the amazing volunteers in the area – and hopefully plenty of new ones).
HEARTLAND REGIONAL
Date: Apr 4 - Apr 7 2019
Event: Regional
Program: FIRST Robotics Competition
Smith-Cotton High School
2010 Tiger Pride Boulevard
Sedalia, MO 65301 USA
I was searching for information on FLL Jr and stumbled on this today.