With SXSW, one of the largest events and biggest economic impact in Texas being cancelled due to coronavirus, and more and more FRC events posponed or cancelled is there any real risk of the houston Championship being cancelled?
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If Houston were cancelled, FIRST would lose out on a extremely large amount of profit. In order to protect their economical stability, I assume that, unless the outbreak gets much, much worse, they would not cancel the championship.
EDIT: I could foresee FIRST delaying the event til July, however.
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I think at this point we can assume that all events are at risk of being cancelled. However, I am not sure what the state of the outbreak will be in April. The outbreak and its containment efforts are changing rapidly, and right now there is a wide range of outcomes possible.
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There is a risk, sure. But I don’t see them abandoning Championship any sooner than late this month (around Week 4 or Week 5), when more information is known.
I do believe FIRST and local affiliates will try to do right by teams whose events were canceled, either in the form of rescheduled regional tournaments or some district event equivalent (say, a summer league or a mulligan DCMP-style event for unknown stakes). That said, I do not see FIRST fielding a Championship-scale event outside of its scheduled timeslots because it is an incredibly large production and venues of that size are booked years ahead.
FIRST has enough money in the bank to cover the registration fees of every team at champs many times over, so I wouldn’t worry about that angle.
Good point, George R. Brown must be pretty booked up for the summer by now.
But consider as well the amount of sponsors that might back out over the whole ordeal. It’s very likely that FIRST is losing money on the virus.
Sure, they are probably losing money, but I trust they will be able to put health first if necessary. This certainly isn’t the time for a show-must-go-on mentality.
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A lot of large organizations are making a lot of very tough decisions right now. SXSW cancelling, Microsoft/Amazon/Apple directing employees to work from home, etc.
It doesn’t seem like these decisions are based on making money.
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To be precise: their FY2019 financials showed about $27.7m in cash on hand on 6/30/19, and on page 12 they calculate just under $45m of “Financial assets available to meet general expenditures within one year”.
It may change some plans and stunt growth, but they are in a position to weather this.
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Many large companies dropped out of SXSW before they cancelled, to the point where it would have been silly to continue, they would have been asked to refund customers due to the limited events. I’m sure FIRST is concerned about having a critical mass of volunteers and teams dropping out to the point that the whole event would need to be diminished in scope.
The organization that spearheads large events in Houston had another large event cancel in Houston and they made it clear that it was not due to the Houston location or at the request of Houston or Texas but due to the world-wide nature of the event - so at least so far it wouldn’t be cancelled due to the local authorities. https://www.houstonfirst.com/news/press-releases/houston-first-statement-on-cancellation-of-ceraweek
I’m in no educated place to make predictions, but I will anyways and say it’s maybe 50/50 at this point. Our team rarely gets to championships but we are hopeful for this year. It would be a bummer especially for seniors on teams that may only qualify once in their career.
Since the 2021 teaser has already dropped, they probably already have sponsors lined up for next year and couldn’t just repeat the 2020 concept.
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Was pretty booked up a few years ago. Events of this scale and magnitude are planned in the range of YEARS, not months.
yes
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Many contracts (including airfare and hotel bookings) include “force majeure” clauses down in the fine print that can be activated once the WHO finally declares this a pandemic.
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