Wanna ask why...

[KenWittlief]

What if they set up regionals where your team had to attend if every high school has a team.

I think that will be the case eventually, like HS football teams

but take for example, Alaska. How many highschools are there in the entire state? 20, 30? 60?

Would you expect all 20 teams from Alaska to fly to a regional in Seattle, as their only ‘local’ regional?

Same situation in Hawaii, N Dakota, Wyoming… local regional events will most likely be small in numbers.

[GaryVoshol]

What if they set up regionals where your team had to attend if every high school has a team. Or if everyother school had one. I see FIRST growing into absurdly high numbers like FLL. If that happens, then I would go crazy b/c it would be very tough for teams to make names for themselves. It’s a good thing that FIRST is growing, don’t get me wrong. But it’s been tough for 648 to get a reputation in the FIRST community. And the numbers are getting so high for me to remember which team is which. (Reuse the numbers again for God’s sake!)

I can see the advent of preliminary qualifying competitions, similar to what many states have for FLL. In Michigan, you go to one of the qualifying tournaments, and about 1/4 advance to State. For FRC, this could be modified to have two weekends of preliminary tournaments to whittle the field down to about 1000 nationally, which are then eligible for the 30 or so larger regional tournaments. You would have to advance out of at least one preliminary tournament sometime before you are eligible for the Championship “Tier” system.

Alternatively, we may get to the point where teams are limited in the number of regionals they can attend.

[MikeyP]

This has been discussed many times before in other threads.

What can you do. You live with it and do the best you can. Sounds like the real world to me.

Ouch.