Given your posts in this thread, I think it’s worthwhile to point out the messenger has a huge part of the impression.
It’s rather apparent you don’t like the decisions. When you describe the two championships, you’re describing it from your frustration-filtered lenses. It makes sense someone getting that message would be confused. “If this person putting that time in thinks this is strange and doesn’t like it, why does it make sense?”
You come into it being upset about themes. People aren’t stupid. They pick up on your word choices. They pick up on your body language. You’re contributing to the “awful experience” by making their mind up for them in the way you tell the story. Earlier, you didn’t have those feelings and shared it entirely differently.
There’s absolutely things in FIRST that make me raise an eyebrow. I don’t understand some decisions and others make me shake my head. But, I haven’t seen the experiences you’ve seen with a rather large sample size of events and team interactions. Have I seen some frustrated by various aspects? Absolutely. But, I can’t think of a single time I’ve had any issues with themes being laughed at or situations I’d call awful experiences.
Try providing the information without coloring it with your frustration. See if you get the same responses?
I was more commenting on this statement by you earlier.
I have definitely noticed a lot of downgrade when it comes to student experience since moving to two championships. If that is caused by two championships being hosted or not, I don’t know, but there has been what in my mind is an undeniable downgrade in event quality across two of the 4 programs FIRST offers at the championship level.
Are these things fundamentally changing the experience for students? I’d say mostly not, and agree with you there, but I do think that they are significant. I know of MANY people who exclusively got hooked into FIRST because of the venue/atmosphere of championships, which has undeniably been degrading.
It’s true no high school athletic sport has a true national championship (or even a regional one.) Some sports have “invitational” championships. But I don’t see that as the standard FIRST is measured against because we only have a few state championships, and several multi-state champs.
The real issue is HOW the 2 Champs is implemented. It rigidly assigns teams to one of the champs with no rationale other than “they should be equally sized.” This prevents mixing of teams from different areas of the world, which is clearly one of the primary experiences of going to Champs. This problem can be easily fixed with several candidate solutions, and that’s what FIRST should be looking at. Because FLL and FTC attend as well, this rises to the level of FIRST HQ, not just FRC.
And while the student experience may not have changed much, I don’t think the same can be said about mentors. Experiences mentors are what drive FRC and they definitely feel a loss from not mixing with teams that they used to see regularly. I don’t know about Detroit, but Houston is beginning to feel somewhat parochial in comparison to the more cosmopolitan 1 Champs.
Those can still be addressed by using different rotating assignments. For example, dividing into 4 regions with the West and Southeast being rotated between Detroit and Houston, there would be no changes in travel costs but increased mixing. Running 2 Champs on two consecutive weekends in a central location also could address these issues.
Richard,
personally, I have brought up the idea of 2 Champs at 1 location back-back weekends, on several different occasions.
I would have thought the reception would be highly positive and that from a financial and resource standpoint, a win-win.
It didnt seem that way from the responses.
My guess is if they are deciding to do that in the future, its hush-hush until the final contracts are signed.
Let’s start with that we never get to see our 2014 Champs alliance member 1640!
More seriously, look at the Einstein Alliance captains and first picks at Houston. Dominated by Northern California teams plus 148 and the usual suspects from the PNW (including 2122). We have all seen each other multiple times, not just at Champs but at Regionals and off seasons. It was fun for a while, but this is going to get old fast.
I’d like to see a “swap list” system happen where teams could opt in to switching spots at Championships with a team going to the other one. Hopefully, about the same number of teams on both sides would want to switch, so most teams on the list could get their way.
This actually existed for the first year of the Two Champs setup, but was discontinued by FIRST due to lack of usage, IIRC. I believe there was a blog post mentioning the discontinuation.
I wish I was around for those days. Who knows maybe we can make it happen again somehow.
While Lil_Lavery’s response makes sense about the alliance captains, I still think that “0.01%” or teams are important. Like Citrus_Dad (or someone) stated, even if students have no opinion about 2Champs, the mentors’, especially long established mentors of very well known and successful teams, opinions matter too. Mentors are super important to sustain FRC
This is moderately tangential off a tangent, but if I’m talking with someone about my team’s (2976) experience at the 2018 championship they’re always a lot more confused about how we were world champions, but weren’t even one of the top teams in our little part of the championship, than they are about the fact that there’s a second world championship. That mostly just gets a “huh. Neat.” Teaming up with several other teams when one or two of them are clearly the strong teams is a whole lot more unique to FRC than splintered championships, but I don’t see anyone advocating to go back to individual teams competing alone for the sake of confusion.
Last year, you may remember we had a mechanism that allowed for Championship qualified teams on their non-home Championship waitlist to get offered slots to that non-home event under certain circumstances. Those circumstances arose for 16 teams last season, and all of those were offered slots at their non-home Championship, but only four teams took us up on those offers. Because this program benefitted so few teams, but added significant complexity to the system, we will not be offering this option for the 2018 Championship.
I’m sure this decision will be disappointing to some, and I’m sorry about that, but I do believe it’s in the best interest of FRC overall.
While I never did get around to checking the numbers I questioned in another thread, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that most teams are not running into this problem. This isn’t to say it isn’t a loss to the mentors / teams that experience it though.
They offered a “religious holiday conflict” exception last year. All the teams from Israel, our team, and two teams from the St. Louis area ended up in Detroit rather than Houston. I believe they are offering it again this season, but wish they would expand it to include other reasons.
I will be interesting to see if the new president has any sway over this, but I kind of doubt it for the next update. TwoChamps was announced in April 2015 - two years prior to that happening. The 2015-16 extension to St. Louis as a host was announced in Sep 2013 – still more than a year and a half out for just staying put. Unless I’ve missed something 2021 Champs is less than 1.5 years away and so I’d expect an announcement any day now. It was probably decided before he even came on board.
But I think it is more prevalent among teams that put more energy into FRC and help make the program what it is. That could have long term consequences for how the program thrives.
Your saying that this is only a problem for 4 teams (assuming 4,000 FRC teams). I just listed close to a dozen and I know that its much more prevalent among other teams attending Houston. I don’t have enough contact with teams attending Detroit, but a couple of teams that I’ve talked to from that side also are feeling cloistered.
