1732 is looking to build upon our success this season and take the next step by being more competitive at the championship. After seeing 22/24 alliance captains and first picks that played in the division finals at north champs attended at least 3 events, it is clear that more plays is a strong predictor for success at the championship. Thus, we are considering attending 3 regionals in 2018 but have some questions/concerns.
For those teams that did attend 3 regionals, was it worth it?
What were the biggest challenges or downsides?
Did your students/mentors get burned out? Did you do anything to attempt to prevent burn out?
For me, there are two major things to consider when going to 3 competitions:
1: spacing out the competitions (by at least 2 weeks)
2: working around your “home” regional
For example, Midwest is our home regional (week 5). So already if we want to go to three competitions while giving enough time to rest / do homework / make changes, we only have a few options.
week 1, week 3, week 5
week 3, week 5, week 7
week 2, week 5, week 7
We normally don’t like going to week 1 events, so that’s out. But thankfully with the 7 Rivers Regional this year, going to 3 events became extremely convenient.
I would recommend any team going to 3 events to go to a week 7 regional. It was great for tuning our shooter for champs, and gave our driver a chance to play with the most up to date “meta game”. Hopefully more week 7 events will happen next year, but if not 7 Rivers was a pretty good event for its first year, and was in an amazing location.
We did 3 regionals in 2013, Northern Lights, Wisconsin, and Midwest. (We also qualified for champs after winning Chairman’s at midwest – the last of the 3)
All of the mentors on our team that participated that year proclaim in unison, “Never again”. 2013 was not our strongest year, but we became competitive by the end, which likely would not have happened with all of the additional practice and build time.
In terms of your specific questions, burnout was very real. We had many frustrating mechanical issues in particular the year we did it which we spent too much time trying to solve. I do believe we learned a lot (as mentors - that’s the only perspective I have) in how to direct a build season such that we don’t run in to similar issues again. The decisions we made this season I would argue were largely a result of lessons learned from that year.
If you have buy in from mentors and students, as well as the available funds, its definitely do-able (especially now with 2 Regionals in WI and several more close by with Midwest, and the Twin Cities). A good way to make the decision might be asking the question to the team: if we had gone to another regional this year, what changes would we have made, and would those changes have changed the outcome? Obviously, doing this in hindsight isn’t ideal, but it could at least give you an idea of the expected upside.
On the other hand, you (maybe with a couple other local teams nudge) could rent a space in the area for a group practice field with as close to game ready elements as are available.
My team tends to stick with 2 regionals. As a relatively small team we are always concerned with burnout, and after doing 3 regionals in 2015 we faced some issues like that. 3 Regionals works for some teams, and doesn’t work for other teams, it’s just a matter of assessing the pros and cons of how it would affect your team.
A couple deciding factors that went into our decision:
Higher chance that trained primary/complete pit crew/drive team/strategy team may be unable to attend.
Unavoidable religious conflicts as part of a Jewish School (I’d assume not a problem for your team).
Avoiding Burnout (If your goal is to be more competitive at champs, make sure you aren’t hindering your ability to do so by adding more events)
(I’m sure there are more that I will edit in later).
The other thing to think about is that some of those teams are in the district system, who (correct me if I’m wrong as a member of a team in the regional system) get more plays automatically through 2 district events and district champs. Not all of these teams went to three regionals, and they to some extent can avoid burnout/missed school piling up because district events are only 2 days, as opposed to regionals being 3, maybe 4 (with load in), or 2 weeks of missed school if you’re on a LA team going to the Israel Regional.
3 events work for some teams, 2 is better for others, Some teams have even done 4. All about assessing your team and seeing if it will really benefit you, or may ultimately take away from your goal of being more competitive at champs.
That number (22/24) is fascinating to me. While I’m sure there’s a bit of correlation in there, there is also undoubtedly causation; look at teams like 3309 that have improvements in performance with every event they attend.
2485 has never attended three regionals in a season, so while I can’t speak personally to the benefits, I can give you some of the reasons why we have not, which you may or may not have thought of:
Cost. Attending a third regional is an additional expense to the team.
School missed. Going to a regional means missing 2-3 days of school and being fatigued for the following week. Our students must maintain good relationships with their teachers and this is made very hard by a third regional.
Fatigue. Regionals make you very tired, and an additional one could speed up the inevitable robot burn out.
That said, there are many great reasons to go. Texas Torque went to 4 regionals in 2013 when they won champs!
Keep in mind that a lot of the three event teams are doing so in the district system. The system is set up where you get 2 smaller events plus a district championship.
If not for the district system i wouldn’t want want to do 3 events pre-worlds due to time, money, etc.
That 22/24 figure is impacted heavily by the proliferation of districts within the North Championship qualifying area. District teams will compete at least three teams before reaching Championship. They also have to be very competitive after (typically) two events to even advance past their district championship. It becomes hard to detangle how much of the additional plays form a causal relationship between Einstein success because of this.
I believe 21 of those 22 teams were district teams. 3130 is the lone of the three regional teams (the others being 3310 and 254) to compete at three regionals.
There’s also the weird quirk that both of those 2-regional teams would end up in the finals against one another.
There’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll attend as many events as we can once Wisconsin switches to Districts, especially if there are Saturday-Sunday events and more nearby. That won’t happen in 2018, though, so we’re trying to weigh the costs and benefits of trying to go to 3 Regionals. It’s really attractive, because this year the extra time testing autonomous modes and mechanical upgrades on the competition bot, instead of just the practice bot, could have really changed our outcome at Champs. It’s daunting, though, because of the extra stress it puts on students, mentors, sponsors, and the robot.
I’d say it was worth it. More chances to qualify for Champs, + more playing time = better performance at Champs.
We try to space out our regional, so either Week 1,3,5 or Week 2,4,6. We always take full advantage of Spring Break, so our “Out-of-State” regional usually is chosen to be during Spring Break.
I guess one downside of going to 3 regionals is that although you may have “two weeks” in between each regional, you really have much less time, and that means less time to prototype changes, and ensure that changes are at the point where they can go on the robot and be successful.
Based on my quick manual counts, 20/24 were district teams. 3130 and 1986 attended 3 regionals and 254 and 3310 attended 2.
I’m well aware districts play a very significant role in the amount of plays, but until Wisconsin moves to districts, we will likely be disadvantaged by only attending 2 regionals (But that’s a debate for a district v regional thread…).
To reduce the chance of burn-out, I’ve considered proposing we limit nearly all students and mentors to attending only 2 regionals. With ~75 students, we likely can split the students in half to provide the necessary pit/scouting responsibilities at each away event. The core driveteam and maybe a couple other students/mentors would attend both away regionals, but the majority would attend 1 away regional and our home Wisconsin Regional. Has anyone tried something similar to this?
I’m very excited about some of the talk about this already. However, it wouldn’t completely solve two of the biggest issues we ran into this year (new spring design at Wisconsin causing us to make gear manipulator changes for the championship and differences between our practice and competition bots for autonomous modes. We eventually got both working at the end of the event but it cost us in qualifications).
It’s worth noting that 7 Rivers was the only week 7 regional, and I don’t think that will change. From what I understand FIRST was working with the planning committee to try and not have 7 Rivers week 7 but it was the only week they were able to make it work. FIRST seems to not want any regionals week 7.
With that said, if you avoid week 1 and week 7, the only convenient way to get 3 regionals in is Week 2, 4, 6.
4613 did something similar for their 4 :ahh: regionals and worlds this year. I’ll look for the thread where they spoke about it once I get home but they had no students go to back to back regionals (drive team included)
This was the first year we attempted 2 regionals (Wisconsin and Seven Rivers) and I definitely saw the benefit of doing that although it didn’t help our performance since we completely rebuilt our robot on day 1 of Seven Rivers. I’m not sure I would like to do a third at this point unless we do end up in a district system. I can easily foresee burnout issues with doing that.
We have done 3 regionals 3 times (2013, 2015, and 2017). Our 3rd event was a refreshing amount of fun this year, but leading up to it I was lamenting the grueling length of the season. When you consider champs and state champs we played 5 events every other weekend straight.
3 events is easier on students when one of them includes spring break. (None of ours did this year)
It was more affordable when champs was in our home state. (Houston will be more costly in time and money next year.)
We are fortunate that our home event is close enough not to require hotels, again saving us some time and money.
We are looking forward to districts. We do get better the more we play.
The main goal of my post wasn’t just to highlight districts vs regionals, but rather the multitude of factors that correlate for districts beyond purely the number of plays.
Namely with district teams qualifying for the Championship, in large part they’ve already proven themselves to be a top ~10-20% team in their district. They have to pass not one, but two, qualification hurdles to reach the Championship event via points. This isn’t a representative sampling of all teams, but rather an exclusive group of top performers that has been trimmed down via repeated qualification benchmarks.
I’d be curious to see relative performance of 2 regional vs 3 regional teams at the Championship Events before automatically enrolling in such an expensive venture with the explicit goal of increasing CMP performance. Obviously there’s other net value to playing more, and if you’re willing to invest in another regional for the sake of another regional, go for it. But I’m not sure the 22/24 figure you highlighted really means what you think it means with regards to the 3rd play prior to Championship.
We have played 3 Regionals since 2014. However, one of those is at UCD in town so its very easy for us to attend. In California, it can be difficult to find a place to play 3 without traveling a long distance as most of the Regionals are impacted.
We have found that we generally play much better at the 3rd Regional and carry that momentum to Champs. We also pick the 3rd Regional to be as competitive as possible (why we attended Las Vegas this year).
Note that we played 27 qualifying matches at 3 Regionals this year; 26 last year. Many Districts have 12 qualifying matches, so they get 24 matches in 2 events.
423 in 2016 did 3 district competitions, a DCMP, and CMP. I’d say that’s about the same as 3 regionals and CMP. I don’t think anyone would argue that it was taxing on all of our members, mentors, and support system (parents, school administration). I’ve found time spent at robotics competitions tends to correlate positively with probability of getting sick, and true enough a number of our members were sick at some point during competition season. I was out of school for more than half of the month of competitions between competitions and being sick. That being said, if you plan ahead well it is definitely do-able without killing everyone. Here are some tips I’d recommend:
Make sure that you have backups for all of the important positions (drivers, pit crew, head scout, etc). People will inevitably have conflicts or get sick. The longer your competition season, the greater the chances that at some point someone won’t be available. If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.
Even more important IMO is having a rotation for mentors so no mentor is at every competition. We had it so that no mentor was at more than 3 of the 5 competitions. At a meeting after the competition all of the mentors discussed what happened so everyone stayed on the same page. This was very helpful in keeping the mentors fresh over the long season, and meant no one had to use up all of their sick time.
Try to coordinate transportation with your school. Ours was able to give us a full-size handicap bus and driver for every day, so parents and mentors didn’t have to drive hours every day. It also meant we could leave the trailer at home, so that was one less thing to worry about.
The students will be missing a lot of school. Make sure the administration understands this. Arguably the best thing I did as captain that year was coordinate with the school’s athletic director so we were excused from school for competitions like they were sports games.
If at all possible, try not to charge for each competition separately. This may not be as easy for you in the regional system since you likely need lodging at your competitions, but it greatly increased the number of students we had at each of our competitions. $50 for one competition isn’t bad. $50 each for three is a bit much, and some students might decide not to go to all of them for financial reasons.
<edit>We were actually only planning on attending the two district competitions at the beginning of the season; that’s all we had budgeted for. Then a spot opened up at Montgomery a few days before and we decided why not. Then we qualified for DCMP, then we got picked off the waitlist for CMP. We were only able to attend all of these competitions thanks to the hard work and dedication of our mentors, parents, and school administration (i.e. not to good planning like I said is needed above). We implemented these suggestions as the season progressed, and they were a big help.</edit>