With the news that worlds is being moved to St Louis at I was wondering if anyone knows how many team slots will be available.
The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center advertises it has a million square feet of exhibit hall while America’s Center Convention Complex in St Louis only has a little over half that at 574,000 square feet.
Next year worlds will be two days longer but I still don’t see them accommodating the same number of teams. Is anyone more in the loop than I am and know what REC’s plans are regarding worlds next year?
While this might be true, they did say that they chose St. Louis as the convention center has a very large arena–almost ten times larger with well over 80k seats compared to the (around) 8-9k seats at Kay Bailey. So, if they are shrinking worlds, it’s interesting that they chose an arena that’s 10 times larger than the previous one!
I dont know about this year but in the past they had a completley empty set of pits to do rapid swap over of teams between age groups during the dome. I guess if they just had every square foot of pit space used per age group it would probably be ok.
If i remember correctly to way back when FIRST ran worlds at the dome they had roughly 500-600 frc teams and around 150-200 ftc teams competing at the same time. Part of it was they used both the convention center and the dome itself for competition areas, but it was a bit of a walk. For organization wise i worry a bit that theres not a huge “pit area” compared to dallas or Louisville, but that was with frc pits instead of vex pits.
Part of me thinks the competition fields will all be in the Dome and also the ceremonys, with the pits being in the exibit halls. I predict V5RC will have four days of competition, with V5RC having their own event on days 1-4, and days 5-8 for V5RC MS, VEXU, JROTC, and AI. days 9 through 11 would be VIQRC ES and MS.
if it’s not the above, then it’s odd they decided 11 days.
I think someone mentioed the article with the dates at was wrong, but if it is a longer deal it could be due to the ufl season and the football team needeing the dome use on sunday
Dallas used halls B-F. That’s just over 600,000 sq ft, but there was lots of dead space. St. Louis has just over 410,000 in the main halls, but can also use the arena floor if needed, as it is connected.
I was actually at the dome (looks like hall 6) for a band super regional event and there is well over enough space in my opinion. If they’re extending worlds the case may be that they’re actually increasing the amount of teams competing as a whole or per division.
Hall 6 is absolutely huge though, much much much larger than the dome we are used to so I doubt they would only use it for opening and closing ceremonies. I predict they’ll have the divisions in hall 6 and all pits in hall 1-5.
