I’m interested in clearing up some confusion surrounding methods of qualifying for State/Regional competitions, so I want to know how some other areas handle it. This link provides the rules on how competitions are supposed to send teams to State/Regional competitions. Most of it is pretty clear, but there’s one little note that might be interpreted a little bit differently than intended, perhaps. The special note on page 4 states that each of the state/regional berths should be given to different teams. When a situation arises such that one team wins both Excellence and Tournament Champion(or some other case that would qualify them twice in one event), then another team is qualified for State/Regionals based on their skills score. I assume that this means “skills score at the tournament in question,” and not for the entire region lifetime. Is this assumption correct?
If it is correct, then I have one more question. How are things handled when a team travels to a competition from out of state/region, and qualifies for State/Regionals? Should their slot be wasted(because it is not technically double-qualification, as the rule states), or should it also go to the next highest, unqualified Skills score at the tournament(because this assures that the correct number of slots are “given to that number of different teams”)?
One last question: In this rule, is double-qualification defined as qualifying twice in one event, or twice in a season?
I know I’m not in the right place to get an official answer; I’m just curious how other people interpret and handle these situations. Any help/insight is appreciated.
Yes, it means skills score at that specific tournament.
I would think the best thing to do is to hand it to the highest skills score of a team from that region.
Most of the time its only counted in the tournament. If one team wins every single event, all other states spots would go out to teams based on skills.
Last year in Arizona, it was not on a tournament by tournament skills basis. They were put into spots from the skills qualifications spots that were given out after the last skills tournaments in February.
It makes sense to me since some tournaments may have only a few teams that deserve to go to state/regionals, and the teams that top skills with the winners taken out would be pretty mediocre
The reality is that the event coordinator for the state tournament has some amount of discretion on who attends the event. It is quite possible that the same 12 teams earn 36 of the 48 tournament champion and excellence award spots at a state event. In order to fill the tournament, the EC will absolutely look at the skills scores from the whole season… and likely find those 12 teams at or near the top. When that is the situation, the EC must use their best judgement to make objective selections to fill the tournament.
Here in Wisconsin in past years, the field at the State Championship has been filled in the following manner:
Each qualifying event had 8 Automatic Qualifying spots to state, Excellence, Tournament Champions, Tournament Finalists and Design. Once all Qualifying Events were finished, the rest of the field would be filled by taking the list of Programming Skills scores and the list of Robot Skills scores, and deleting the automatic qualifiers. Then we would choose the top remaining skills scores by alternating back and forth between Programming and Robot skills (Programming first) until we filled the field.
This year, each qualifying event will have only 6 Automatic Qualifying spots to state, Excellence, Tournament Champions, Design and Robot Skills. The remaining field will be chosen from the Robot Skills scores after the last qualifying event after the automatic qualifiers have been removed.