Qualifying for Nationals

I don’t know if anybody else has noticed, but I’m trying to get my sister teams to qualify for nationals (we’re from SoCal). Every regional I find only qualifies for States and not nationals. Does anybody know if there’s a rule against sending a team to another state to qualify? If they qualify for states at that competition, would they be able to go to the states in their home state or would they have to go to the states from the state they qualified in? I hope that makes sense.

By “Nationals” I’m assuming you mean US Open. I believe that a team that earns an excellence award, design award, robot skills or tournament champion qualifies for the US Open. Contact your RECF rep and he should be able to add the US Open qualification to your state spots.

You can compete in a tournament in another state but cannot earn a state spot in any other state but the state that the team is registered in. If you earn a spot in another state, it will not transfer to your home state nor can you compete in that state’s state tournament. You can probably qualify for the US Open in a tournament in a different state. Your robot skills score will count.

Robot Events lists Tournament Champions, Excellence, Design and Skills Awards as qualifiers for the US Open. Those same awards also qualify you for the State tournament only if the recipient of the award and the award itself are both in the same state.

Thank you. I’ve looked at the awards for regional competitions in SoCal. Excellence, tournament champion, and skills only qualify for states now. Earlier in the the season they qualified for both. Last week, design qualified my team for the U.S open, but not states. Yesterday, excellence qualified my team for States, but not the U.S open (which is okay because we were already qualified). My sister team won tournament champion yesterday but only qualified for States. We’re considering sending them to Nevada to qualify for the U.S open. Thanks again.

email your RECF Regional Support Manager regarding questions about spot allocations for US Open

No. Just email your RECF rep. If they won tournament champion, they should also qualify for US Ooen. This is an easy fix.

This is likely true. The event pages may be mistaken.

I remember there was a tournament in Starstruck where my team won the tournament, but didn’t qualify for the CREATE US Open. (I don’t remember how we found out, but I’m sure one of our coaches checked [edit: checked with the RECF rep].)

That event was added to the schedule unusually late in the season, so maybe it didn’t fit the criteria for the CREATE US Open.

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We had the same thing happen. Contacted the RECF rep and it was fixed.

I meant that I assume they checked with the RECF rep.
We definitely checked the page. Now that I think about it, I suppose we could have assumed the event page was correct without checking with our RECF rep, but I doubt it.
I suppose it’s possible that the event was submitted too late to be official for purposes of the CREATE US Open, but early enough that our regional rep allowed it to qualify for States.

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So, to clarify, is it correct that robotevents.com awards descriptions are not always a complete list of what they qualify for, and all official tournaments in the U.S. should qualify for the CREATE US Open and States regardless of what the EP lists on robotevents?

This is kind of true. However, unless the event shows US Open as a qualifying spot, you won’t be issued an invitation. So your RECF rep needs to add that to the specific event. You must contact your RECF rep to get this fixed.

I had the same problem and I contacted the Create Foundation. (Their customer service is amazing by the way.) They told me that all events are in fact supposed to qualify for Nationals / Create US Open, and they said they would reach out to my rep. If I don’t hear back from them in two weeks, I’m supposed to contact them again, and I’ll probably contact my rep as well.

Bottom line is the events are all supposed to qualify to Nationals, but there was some issue with the event pages in California, and it looks like it’s getting sorted out now.

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