Regionals to Districts - Getting Ready in Wisconsin

We are sailing Uncharted Seas here (water game, well, you know). There are geographic challenges in Wisconsin such that there are probably too many teams for a single Western Wi District and not, at the moment, quite enough for two such events. I’m just looking at building infrastructure, of the human sort, for either option. Specifically my initial post was along the lines of “what volunteer roles should our people be considering this season to get ready for next?”

But there are a lot of imponderables. We are adjacent to Minnesota. Will Minnesota volunteers come over into Cheeseland if their teams no longer can? How many Districts will WI have in '26 (and going forward) and is there a pool of volunteers in the state sufficient for this?

This all ties into complicated issues such as starting/sustaining teams in rural areas. You need more teams to make Districts fly. So expand events to anticipate this. You might struggle to fill some new events early on, so don’t expand…and create an unfair situation where some teams have to travel/stay in hotels for two events while other (often better funded teams to boot) have two “home games”.

This is a bit of inside baseball stuff, but bottom line is that Districts are coming, and as one of the (relatively, we are still small townies) better funded/organized teams over this way we need to step up next year.

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As a point of comparison for if and when northern Wisconsin gets some teams, when Michigan districts started, the northernmost event was Traverse City - it was specifically a bit north and out of the way to encourage team growth, and yet for 857/2153/2586 it was about 6.5-7 hours away for just one of the two events (though 2153 only went to TC instead of 2 events). Superior, WI, to Milwaukee is about 6 hours and hopefully this drive would only be needed for DCMP.

This would probably also be the worst case of being just across a border and not being able to go to a really close event (if they had a team).

We’ll do what we have to do. As a rural team we are already doing two “away games”. Travel costs are the single biggest item in our budget, and frankly this is the sort of thing that limits our team size. We just can’t afford to take 30 kids out of town for two events. And it seems mean to leave kids behind. (Yes, I know, lots of teams do but I’m an old softy).

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