Average Cost of Tournaments

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion VRC
1

So I know I’ve heard a lot of grumbling about the rising costs of tournament registration and almost of that grumbling was back by anecdotal evidence framed in the “back in the good 'Ol days” style.

So i decided to actually get some data on this.

This is what I found:

Now this is what this data represents. I did not record Scrimmages or the Marion county Tournament (it was free).

I was a little surprised how level the cost has been. also a little surprised that as more events cropped up that price didn’t decrease. this is why I’m dying to have team #'s from those seasons.

I stopped at Clean Sweep because that is as far back that robot events had data for.

I have attached my excel sheet for those of you that want to look at it.

Note: The capacity and teams data for years before gateway is highly suspect.
indiana tournaments.xlsx (27.8 KB)

2

Nice job analyzing data for events. Thanks!

3

You should look up the inflation rates to see how the prices compare against inflation rates.

4

It would also be interesting to note how much it cost to run competitions? How much to buy the game kits over the years? I don’t have the history as I have not been around VEX all that long. Game kits are expensive! Also, how much has the cost to run teams? Cost to register teams increased? It would also be interesting to have some sort of an index on how much it cost over the years to buy robot parts whether it is controllers, joysticks, motors, etc. We raised our prices this year so we wouldn’t have to pay the $5 per team registration fee out of our pocket.

5

that is a a lot of data, not sure it all can be found.

Some of the older EP’s might have emails that have team registration and field element costs from that far back.

here ya go.

doesn’t effect it that much, but it does flatten the curve.

6

I’m not debating whether they should have raised prices, they can do what is necessary and everyone can make their own choice to participate or not.

But I am debating the legitimacy of the table showing a change from 72.08 down to 62.06, even adjusted for inflation, is normalized to 1.02.

The price went up almost 17% from 2016 to 2017

7

i don’t see your point

8

I read it wrong, I now see how you adjusted, I conflated the table with the statement below it saying it didn’t change it much, I see now you meant it didn’t change the values much, not that the expense didn’t change much…sorry

I started with this statement

Which I can’t agree with, unless I’m missing something. Especially for last year to this year?

9

No big deal. you had me checking my math though.

10

I made a few graphs:

The spike of events in the 2015-2016 season did see a drop in price. It’s reasonable that if you started financing a team in that season the sudden jump from just above $60 to register a team to just above $70 in that amount of time would be seen as fairly rapid change. However had the price remained at the 2010-2015 price point the eventual climb to the 2017-2018 number would likely not have been see as that drastic of a price increase.

11

So it looks like it was very flat from 2010-2011 season through the 2016-2017 season and then there is a spike up in costs. There was also an increase, be it modest, for event partners who hosted more than one tournament after the 2013-2014 season but that did not seem to have a huge effect, especially adjusted for inflation. That increase was when they started only sending one trophy pack no matter how many tournaments you host.

I realize that correlation does not necessarily equate to causation but it also does not mean that the relationship does not represent causation. This year, for the first year in quite some time, we have fewer high school and fewer middle school VRC teams in Indiana. We did have a drop in MS teams a few years ago due to the rapid increase in VexIQ but we finally regained those numbers back last year and now we are down again. I am sure the huge increase in registration fees had nothing to do with it.

12

I am working on getting team numbers across the seasons.

The last time vex upped the price was in the 2013-2014 season $75/25 → $100/50. I’d like to see how that effected the registration numbers in the proceeding season

13

That will be interesting. It would also be interesting to know if other fees went up at the same time.

14

Do you have number of teams per event? As venue size increases, so does our rent of the space. AT least for us. We have to rent the gym and the cafeteria and the library and a few classrooms and have more janitors on site to clean up for a larger set of people.

15

Keep in mind this data is only for Indiana and not the world.

16

yes and for the last several seasons the data is good. If you go back to clean sweep and round up, I wouldn’t rely on those numbers. its all in the excel sheet in the original post

17

Very interesting…thank you for putting this together. I am very worried about the low Indiana MS & HS team numbers. I’m sure the price doubling for registration has something to do with it.

18

The first teams fee increased by 50% not 100.

Yeah the additional team fee increased 100% but it has in the past increased 200% so we can count our blessings at this time.

I’ll certainly be interested in unpacking this data this time next year.

19

This is startlingly different from Arizona. Since Skyrise (when I started), fees for standard qualifying tournaments have been fixed at $50 across the board (likely with a few exceptions, I haven’t looked closely), with the exception of a few $55 tournaments this year.

20

As in they are fixed by a regional manager or?