I know I’m thinking a lot about the future mid build season but I was thinking a lot about this topic last night.
Last year FIRST went back to one championship after years of doing two, it makes sense there’s less teams now post covid. This year they’re still doing one champ but now there’s 200 more teams thankfully, meaning that about 1/4 of all teams in FRC go to champs. I’m assuming next year it will be more of the same, hopefully a few more teams though if possible.
I want to think about 6 or more years in the future though when we reach team numbers beyond 10,000 and there’s like 5000-6000 active teams, what are they gonna do for champs? I think FIRST has about 3 options of where they will go.
Option 1, Staying with one championship: FIRST could just stay with the one championship for a while, it just means that the percentage of teams moving on falls year to year which in the past at least is not something FIRST wants. For the sake of argument, though let’s imagine they go with this, higher level teams won’t be affected and they’ll have fun at champs, what this really affects are the more mid level teams such as my team, we’ll have way less of a chance to go which really kinda hurts us. Our team has gone to district champs every year it’s been a thing, but we’ve only gone to worlds occasionally, so we kind of treat worlds as like the reward for a good season, we don’t exactly try very hard there, but making that reward less and less obtainable would be sad for us. Anyways FIRST knows this and so it probably won’t happen
Option 2, back to two champs: This worked in the past and it could still work in the future and it offers a lot of pros. Having two champs would somewhat fix the whole not enough slots issue and so a lot more teams could compete. The biggest con though has been discussed here numerous times however, it’s not a true “worlds”, there’s no true winner etc etc. I could definitely see FIRST going back to this for a bit, though it won’t be very sustainable because what do you do when you need 3 champs now? Scary thought.
Option 3, Super Regionals: I’m not super familiar with FTC so I don’t know how it works there but anyways the idea here is to add a 3rd/4th level of competition for teams. I personally really like this option as it’s a way to still a reward and next step for teams when achieving worlds just isn’t possible. I think there would be like 4 or 5 super regionals in FRC, 3-4 in NA and one in Europe or the Middle East, then maybe one in SA eventually. Super Regionals are only really possible when there are enough teams to justify it but I imagine the way it goes for districts is you start with everyone in district events, then half of those quality for state champs, than half of those qualify for a super regional, than half of those teams go to worlds. Regionals would work similarly but just go directly from regional to super regional.
Anyways sorry for the text dump but I didn’t really see a dedicated discussion in recent time about FRC super regionals so I wanted to see what people thought.
