In South Carolina, our state tournament is on March 12, which is four days before the registration deadline for Worlds (March 16). Does this mean teams that the 6 teams that qualify for Worlds at this tournament have only these 4 days to raise $850 plus expenses and register, or will they get extra time? If not, doesn’t this seem unfair to the poorer teams, who don’t have the sponsors and/or ability to pay to go and will have to forfeit their spots?
March 12 is also the deadline to register for the U.S. open robotics championship.
Yes, this does seem unfair to teams like you, but it is not on Vex’s part. They cannot regulate what events happen when. You should suggest to the event coordinators that next year they have the event two weeks earlier.
The first year we qualified for Worlds our state (MN) competition was also in early March. It was a hard decision (financially), but we committed to making it happen and registered right away. Luckily things worked out well, the community supported us and finances turned out to not be an issue.
Now the MN state competition is held significantly earlier to negate that problem.
I like the later date. I pushed for having our region as late as possible so we could get more spacing between events and better quality robots. We like having 5 events for our teams in January and February. I remember the days when we went all the way through March. Jamming all the events together has drawbacks. You guys may be resilient but us old folks are less so.
Most of the local PA teams are not competitive (read as “working robot”) until early January and events three or four weeks in a row gets tiring and makes for volunteer burn out. Every other week for an event is a much nicer pace.
So that puts us in a bind to move out states to the max or not have volunteers any more. We are lucky enough to be able to drive to Kentucky too. (no flights to deal with)
Another benefit is in the Northeast we get snow and unlike other places it can cripple us. We had our first ever snow day weekend planned this year. And we actually used it too! Because for seven years straight, it has snowed at Dockbots and this year it really snowed. So we were happy having the March 5th snow day available.
Events in northern virginia were hell basically. We had them almost every weekend, and every time it was ten teams winning all the spots to states. Then snow happened and the one break we had that was over a month was reduced to two weeks. Then after states, VA teams have 2 months until worlds. That’s the only part I like.