I’d like to know any tips you have for teams that have never been to St. Louis / CMP before. We intend to take travel in two vans and the hotel that we are staying at has free parking so we should have travel in the city handled. Anything ranging from tips about robot preparation to places to eat would be appreciated.
Eric Curry of Team 1208 Metool Brigade has posted a guide to St. Louis in the past. Here’s a link to his most recent post, for teams attending the St. Louis Regional a few weeks ago.
Maybe 1208 is planning a Championship update? 
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of the regional guides existence
Here is the latest version of Team 1208’s Championship Guide:
Guide to St. Louis.pdf (2.26 MB)
Guide to St. Louis.pdf (2.26 MB)
The biggest tip you can have… get everything booked ASAP! This includes hotel, flight, dinners, and anything else your team wants to do while in town. Things fill up FAST when there are hundreds of FRC, FTC, and FLL teams in town!
ROBOPROM! The students loved it and it was great social for the mentors! Also if you have never been to St. Louis the Arch is walking distance and pretty neat to check out. Book everything as soon as you can as the city will be busy with LOTS of other teams. Oh and good luck!
SO GOOD! Food and service! We walked in with about 50 people, and we all had food in 15 minutes - not to mention the employees there are super friendly. Definitely make a stop there if you get the chance.
My tip would be to make sure that those working in the pit don’t get stuck there the entire time. There’s so much to see, do, and experience at champs - and yet it’s really easy to miss it all by working on the robot the entire time. Make sure they sub out and get time to visit other pits, collect pins, watch matches, but merch, etc. Champs is a blast!
Also, have some sort of scouting plan in mind - maybe a collaboration with other teams. Last year 4814 ended up as the first (second maybe?) seed in their division, and they hadn’t been scouting (they were a rookie team playing defence - they never expected they would be picking). Needless to say they had a mad rush Friday night/Saturday morning trying to whip a plan into action.
Bring extra $$$ for the FIRST store so that you can buy your memorabilia for your 1st ever FRC World Championship experience.
If you have time I highly recommend visiting the City Museum, it will totally change your perspective of the word museum.
Scholarship Row. Seriously, not just for juniors. Send the sophomores too. Heck, send ALL the students (just not at once, folks there get overwhelmed and then can’t talk to students) .
Good chance to speak with key suppliers too, like AndyMark, Bishop Wisecarver, and so many more.
Take the opportunity to go check out some of the best robots in the world up close. I was lucky enough to get a close look at 67 and 1114s robots at CMP in 2012 and that’s something I will never forget.
Attend the Conference. There are some really great presentations each year. The presentation abstracts will be published soon. http://www3.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/firstplace/workshops-and-conferences
Encourage your mentors to attend the annual NEMO (Non-Engineering Mentor Organization) meeting, to be held Friday morning from 10am to noon - come and go as your schedule dictates- in room 255 in America’s Center. Open to all college-age and adult mentors - we will be discussing non-technical topics of interest to the group. http://www.firstnemo.org
Make sure to reserve Roboprom tickets on time if you have people planing on attending. Bring good shoes, you will walk, A LOT.
I can vouch for this. How many other museums have a ball pit?
What he said… definitely
Make sure and meet other teams!!!
Cheer for everyone!!
Quick question: How do you register for the conferences?
My biggest recommendation is to see as many robots as possible in the pits. No matter how many you see, you’ll probably wish that you had seen more. To me, at least, there’s honestly nothing more inspiring than going to the pits at Champs and seeing hundreds of amazing teams and hundreds of different robots all designed to play the same game in hundreds of different ways.
The Championship is a celebration of all FIRST programs. There is so much stress when you compete, but try to take time and visit with some FLL and FTC teams. Invite them to your pit.