Open spots and Signup Data (in Indiana)

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
#1

Hello Forum,

A little over a month ago the Indiana EP’s received a message that warned that due to an increase in events and decrease in teams that many events may not meet the standard 16 teams it takes to be a qualifying tournament. This caused stress for many EP’s and has started conversations about price’s of tournaments and vex’s registration fees. I wanted more data before I take a position on this and without knowing how many Indiana teams there are and when they signed up any sort of conclusion can not be proved. I know there is some sort of Update system on the Discord that reports when new teams sign up, if any of the mods over there know how to pull that data I’d be pretty grateful, as i’d rather not scroll through the thread and manually extract it.

I started tracking sign-ups in our state on every weekday around 9am each day on September 21st. Robot events will only display a capacity if the events has exceeded or met the event’s half capacity or the date is one month from the event’s date. This means I have only been able to track capacity at events that have reported their current open spots to robot events. If anyone knows away to glean the hidden information I would be interested to learn how.

Any way, its been over a month so I thought it was a good time to release the data for my local EPs and for any other data nerds out there. I have attached the excel sheet with my raw data for anyone that is interested. out side of just being interesting data, it will be nice to know after a few years of collection when the peak sign-up times are.

Graph #1

Indiana as of right now is at about half capacity for all our events, including a scrimmage (which is dragging our numbers way down). I know for a fact that we are above the 50% mark because two of the unreported events are mine and they are nearing their half way marks, Based on some minor interpolation of the data I’d guess we are closer to 60%, but I can’t know for sure without EPs telling me what the unreported events are actually at.

Graph #2

This graph shows the amount of signups we have had in our state since 9/21.

There are a few major spikes, the one earlier this week was the result of 59+ teams signing up. Since many events hit their half way mark well before the month before, I had to take that into account when those events went from reporting 60 open spots one day and 29 the next. In that case i would report the ▲spots as 1, not 31. It made the data look a little less crazy. This does mean that the data isn’t 100% representative of how teams sign up.

Graph #3

This is basically the inverse of the last graph, this shows the capacity of the whole state dropping as teams sign up.

A note on these graphs and the data I am attaching, I am fairly certain the times where the number of open spots slips into the negative is where EP’s expanded the size of their tournaments, could also be teams dropping out, but I have noticed Park Tudor’s capacity has grown since august, they may not be the only event to do that.

@Powerbelly , @BottomNotch , @Robo_Eng_13

you may find this data interesting.

-TheColdedge

Related Threads:
Average Cost of Tournamentss
Active Teams by Region
00DATA.xlsx (40 KB)

#2

That is so interesting. I learned something - I didn’t know what the trigger was for the event to display sign ups. So thanks for that information.

Interestingly enough, it is an entirely different story here in Virginia. I’d say our tournaments are probably at about 90% of capacity. There are about two more tournaments that are opening soon and I expect them to fill up in one day. A tournament that opened earlier this week was filled within hours.

I’m curious to see what you find out is causing such a drop in Indiana.

#3

  1. A few years back there were a lot of grants, at least around Indianapolis, to start new teams. I imagine that many of those schools have not continued to budget for their teams or those mentors have moved on after schools neglected to support them.

  2. Last year events filled up very quickly, so it is likely that the number of events this year was increased, but by too many.

  3. The price of tournaments went up substantially. With price increases of 50% or more, I had to reduce the number of tournaments this year from 4 to 3.

  4. Also, I think some teams are slow to sign up for other reasons. At my new school, I had to figure out a reasonable budget before signing up. Then I had to figure out the system for payment and reimbursement. I think the panic email went out a little too quickly.

#4

Which tournaments increased by that much? My data shows a 10% increase on average. There are several venues that are hosting this year below even last year’s average.

my data:

#5

It is that way to the extreme here in Arizona. We have a few fewer events this season, and the number of teams has continued to grow. I believe virtually every tournament is full, because we have people emailing us to ask us to let them register, but we’re full… One of the more popular tournaments filled up in less than a week after being open for registration.

#6

Only tournaments with space are one that popped up on RobotEvents only very recently (DRHS - 10 spots left) and one that is ridiculously far away from most teams (Pinetop-Lakeside - many spots left).

#7

We’re going up to Pinetop-Lakeside with Jude and Kaelan, and renting a cabin together. Robots and friends in the snow, sounds like a good time to me! :slight_smile:

I think teams that are that desperate should go up to that tournament, but easier said than done.

#8

I know some (including mine) went up $10 per team, but I don’t know of any that went up 50%.

#9

Yeah, turns out I was way off on that. I think I was just remembering when tournaments were mostly $50 and didnt really notice the price creep until this year. I can’t believe some are now $85. I didn’t think I’d been doing this long enough to say, “I remember when…,” But time does fly.

Still a 70% increase over 5-6 years is a lot.

#10

Most of the events my teams are registered for here in socal are $150, some are more.

#11

Dang. I wonder how cost of living and school budgets affect that. I see California teacher salaries are on average about 18k higher. I’d be interested to see how much California vs Indiana spend per student.

#12

Isn’t everything in California more expensive though? Housing, gas, etc.

And a lot of the tournaments closer to Christmas and beyond here seem to fill up later. Early season usually isn’t too bad, but once more teams get robots built, they fill up more.

#13

I imagine it has to do with the higher demand driven by the larger number of teams. Higher demand tends to result in a higher cost if the supply cannot keep up.

In any case, I’m pleased we aren’t paying Cali prices here.

#14

Amen to that!

#15

For Those Indiana Teams looking for comps below the average cost.

here’s the list.

You will have to leave the comfort of Indianapolis to pay less however.

#16

I would really love to leave Indianapolis more, as we tend to see a lot of the same teams (and designs). With transportation costs/logistics (and the cost of leaving my wife at home with the toddler and baby for an even longer day) it’s not yet worth it. But I always love seeing what comes out of other areas at the state tourney.

#17

We made the hike to both Syracuse and Crown Point last year.

They were nice experiences, but driving 3+ hours to come in second place makes the second 3+ hours kinda uncomfortable.

#18