Worlds qualifying awards

I feel like there are not enough awards that will send you to worlds for how good your robot is. Of course, there is winning the competition and wildcard(but teams could literally get lucky to be part of the winning team), what else is there? At every regional, two teams are sent to worlds for publicizing the FIRST the best; the Chairman’s Award and Engineering Inspiration(Chairman’s Award #2)(personal opinion but I’m sure many would agree). Idk I’m currently at a point where I’m just sad and kinda salty that we went 11-1 at a comp but couldn’t qualify for worlds :(.

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Welcome to California. At this point it’s basically just pray to dean kamen or some other god that cali will switch to districts.

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I’ve been wondering how Cali teams feel that their regionals are basically dominated by the same 6 teams every year. It doesn’t seem fair to that a few teams on the other alliance may get wildcarded and that’s the extent to which Cali gets represented. Maybe some more robot awards would help with that or preferably Cali switching to districts would

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From the vast majority of people who are in california who I have talked to both in person and online most people seem to dislike it very much. A lot of people myself included feel like for top-mid level teams in cali that getting to champs is more based on luck than anything else. The interesting thing is that I’ve heard this sentiment from all levels of teams, not just the mid tier teams. Hopefully something changes in the future but right now it’s not looking too good.

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4 teams go to Champs based on how good their robot is in the regional model, given that each event has a minimum of 1 wildcard. 3 teams go based on culture awards (CA, EI, RAS). Frankly, that seems pretty balanced between robot and culture to me.

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4 teams is a lie, i would say 3 teams go based on how good their robot is and one team gets carried by the winning alliance due to how the alliance selection is arranged

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Your ‘saltiness’ is understandable- it is tough to have a great run as you did but do not qualify for Champs. However, I don’t think your estimation of EI and Chairman’s is just - these teams work their butts off in the off-season and throughout the season for these awards. Also, many times there are teams that are a close second to each of these awards that do not go on either.

I think that every area that is still in the ‘Regional’ format can argue the same points you have. Here in Minny we have a solid group of teams that tend to dominate the Winners circle. However, I know that these teams work just as hard in the off-season to hone their skills as the cultural award winners do - just in a different manner. 4607 has made it a point in recent years to emulate these teams - we just haven’t found the formula to beat these guys yet, but we are getting closer. Maybe if we start to play the end game…

However, you bring up a great point, it would be awesome if there were an ‘Engineering’ Award that qualified a team as well. It would seem to reason that the ‘Engineering Excellence’ award is the rightful award for a slot at Champs. Maybe in the near future?

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well yeah, I’m not saying that these teams don’t work hard. Its just that, although they require as much work if not more to get things done, they really don’t have anything to do with the robot and gets qualified while teams with good robot sometimes just can’t get to worlds…

Might be different in California then. Of the Chairman’s teams in Minny we all fared well on the robot competition side:

  • 1816 - Regional Winners at North Star (#2 Alliance Captain), #6 Alliance Captain at Lake Superior
  • 2220 - Quarterfinalist at Heartland and SVR
  • 3313 - #1 Alliance Captain at North Star, Quarterfinalist at Great Northern
  • 4607 - Finalist at Northern Lights and 10k Lakes

I had an interesting thought about this the other day. I had some friends compete this past weekend, and it really struck me when they didn’t qualify. But hey, even the very best have their off years, right? Additionally, I realized that at this time of year, lots of wildcards go to waste because of the amount of already qualified teams in addition to the wildcard rules, which don’t allow them to work their way down to semifinalists. So I had two thoughts after talking with some other friends:

  1. The manual wild card - Wildcards are first given in the current order, no change there. But if there’s any extras that risk going to waste, the judges can manually award the at risk wildcard to a team they felt is deserving, but didn’t qualify by normal means. OR, judges could have complete control over all of them, including the mandatory minimum one per event.

  2. Judge’s Award qualifies you for champs - The Judge’s Award is arguably the wildcard of awards. It’s given to a team that’s displayed something special during competition, and really has no other outline to the award besides that. What if the award was adopted to be given to a team that demonstrated Championship qualifying qualities, but falls just short. However, because of limited spots at champs, this likely would have to replace the minimum one wildcard generated at every regional.

I realize there’s a lot of kinks to these ideas, but what do you all think? I’d like to know whether I’m crazy or not!

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Wouldn’t switching to a districts model limit the amount of teams going to champs even more than there are now?
Currently there roughly 12 regional competitions in the state of California. Each will send at least 7 teams to Champs (4 teams based on winning, 3 from culture awards (CA, EI, RAS), and more depending on wildcards generated. That is a possible of at least 84 teams to go to Champs.
If California went to a district model, the same teams who are currently dominating the region, will continue the dominate the region and gain district points, and then move on to win at the District Champs, where possible fewer teams will go to Champs.
I just dont see how California going to a district model would solve the complaint at hand.

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In a District system, even if the top teams accrue a thousand points, there will still be plenty of spots lefts for mid tier teams to take. There are no Wildcards in Districts, nor are there burned ones.
The same number of teams would be going to champs, most likely. It’ll just be the better teams that go.

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maybe if the wild card follows down the ranking of qualifications, that could work too

The problem is that the mid/upper-mid tier teams are the ones who get screwed. In cali you probably have a better chance hoping to get picked by the top 3 alliances as a second pick than you do consistently being a mid alliance captain or mid first pick.

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exactly. I feel like its better off staying down at like mid 20th and early 30th rank rather than trying to stay up top

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So if my math is correct, I think California would send 62 teams if they switched to districts and maintained their percentage of teams relative to the rest of the world. Now last year they sent 88 teams which would be a net loss although I do not know how many of them were from the waitlist, which district teams can still qualify off of.

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Also of note, based on California’s size which is similar to FIM, Cali districts would send less than a dozen teams to champs based on culture awards (FIM had 5 RCA, 1 EI, and 2 RAS last year). This would dramatically raise the number of teams that go to worlds based on points, which are the same teams that have a hard time getting wildcards in the regional system.

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Fine, it’s 3 and 3. To me, a 50/50 split is kind of the definition of fair, don’t you think? Remember, FIRST is about more than just robots. The Chairman’s winning team at North Star this past weekend had a tagline in their video - we build kids one robot at a time. The robot is just the vehicle for what we do, it’s not the destination.

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I personally wouldn’t mind one of the technical awards such as excellence in engineering being used as a qualifying award for championship at regionals and at district championships. The teams that win this award, if they already haven’t won the event, typically build very good robots that otherwise would not make it to champs. At least at the regional level a team that wins this award could be the first pick of the finalist alliance at two events and still not go to champs and this would be a likely team to win that award.

The strategy is basically to design a robot to try to be picked by a top tier team rather than designing a robot to win.

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