Since people complain season after season about MAR Champs at Lehigh, how much more would it cost MAR to use another venue?
The easiest answer is a recent response from our Competition Committee Chair, Eric Zygmont.
We always listen to any ideas for consideration but have not found any viable options to date. As Eric mentioned, Lehigh provides the exact services and venue we need at a very low cost with no labor issues (i.e. labor unions). We have studied in depth other options for an alternate venue but nothing has been comparable.
MAR’s operations are entirely run by volunteers who are members of our local teams. Does hosting at Lehigh have its flaws; sure. But its ease of set up, cost of venue & rentals, safety in surrounding complex, and flexibility of Lehigh personnel make it an easy choice for our operating committees.
Thanks for the repost, I knew I had seen it someplace before.
I think its important for the district leadership to keep these things out in front of the teams so they know whats going on. MAR has been very good about being very open about what they are doing an why they are doing it.
It doesn’t stop the whinging, but it does help cut it down quite a bit. Thanks for your posts.
If NJIT is still in, it seems like there are plenty of locations for teams all over MAR to receive kits as long as each kickoff has the required 10 team minimum attending.
TechFire is very excited to host a kickoff event this year at York Country Day School’s new $15M STEAM Center.
Please consider attending Kickoff with us, or picking up your KOP here. We will also be holding a workshop on PID control and get into Vision during our workshop.
We are very excited and hope to see a lot of teams at our kickoff.
Updated as of 2:40PM, will update every day or two. 80 of the 121 teams from last year have registered so far. Hatboro and Mount Olive continue to be the preferred choice for 1st registration slots.
One new rookie team so far, 6327/The Tin Men. Think that’s the 4575/Tin Mint’s spinoff team.
Welcome back to teams 265 (JV team for 223), last seen in 2014. Also returning is team 747, lists rookie year as 2002, but no competition history, so they must have been MIA for a while.
Yea 6327 would be the Boy Scout team the Tin Mints started this year. I believe it was for some of the FLL kids that aged out/others had interest in a team.
Two days until second district registration - MAR is a tiny bit better off than it was at the same point last year.
2016: 106 teams total, 17 teams missing, 2 rookie/returning team
2017: 109 teams total, 15 teams missing, 3 rookie/returning teams
Of the 17 teams missing at this point last year, 8 didn’t return, and 9 registered at some point after 2nd event registration opened.
Last year we ended up with 8 rookie/returning teams. So we need to add ~4-5 new teams, and retain ~50% of our missing teams in order to match our size from last year. 752 and 1791 register late every year, but the others were registered at this time last year (excluding rookies).
70 teams registered in the first 90 minutes. Hatboro, Mount Olive, Seneca, and Montgomery all hit their initial capacity. Odd bug with Bridgewater where TIMS lists 0 available slots, but there are only 19/32 teams registered.
42 teams sitting at 1 event only, 12 teams from last year who haven’t registered yet. Sitting at 112 teams in total, so only 9 off of last years total.
Montgomery looking like the deepest/strongest event overall, with Hatboro, Chestnut Hill, and Montgomery having the strongest top ends.
We are aware of a registration issue that is affecting teams that wish to attend the Bridgewater-Raritan District Competition. We have contacted FIRST and are working on a resolution.
If you intended to register for the Bridgewater-Raritan Event, please join the waitlist. We will be accepting the waitlisted teams as soon as possible.
Waitlist cleared and all teams have registered for 2 events. Currently sitting at 118 teams, we lost 6 from last year, added one rookie. So I would guess that we’ll have 24 +/- 1 slots for the St. Louis event unless we have a large late influx of rookie teams (22 last year). A few of those missing teams tend to be very late registrations, but 869 missing seems odd.
For teams looking at 3rd events - Westtown and Bridgewater seem like likely candidates, with the other events being within a couple slots of their listed capacity preference.
Montgomery is both the largest and deepest event, and should be a useful preview of MARCMP gameplay.
The waitlist for third play will be cleared shortly. We sent in the list a week ago to FIRST. Basically all teams on the waitlist will get into the event they choose except Montgomery which is at max capacity.
MAR Kickoff Video Top 10 List: Submit your way you know you are in MAR and see if it makes the cut. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/T5L9XBV (We want all the pranks over the years too!)
I have been updating the sheet with 3rd event and outside district/regional registrations. Post in here or PM me if you know about any other external regional/district registrations. I can only quickly find the internal MAR 3rd plays.
You can see roughly how many 3rd event slots are still open on the far right “Listed Capacity Remaining” column.
I saw this line and was curious about waitlist clearing and submittal to FIRST. In NE, we dont need HQ approval to clear waitlists, so it struck me as something different in another district. Do you guys work through HQ to clear your waitlist?
We don’t have direct access to the the registration system (and from my knowledge, no district does), but we provide recommendations which FIRST follows 99% of the time. We message our contacts at FIRST who manually adjust the team registrations within their system. Each year, our Competition Committee oversees team registration within MAR events making sure all teams get at least 2 plays and that the event rosters are as even as possible. Moving forward, our new Program Director will oversee registration every year.
