I’ve been invited to go with one of my friends to worlds as a teammate/spectator, but I heard of a system where teams on the waitlist can fill any open spots/extra spots. Is this legit?
It’s unlikely many if any teams get pulled from waitlist. They also prioritize local area teams and sometimes teams sending more than one team to worlds
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Although, I think walk ons are different that wait list teams. The wait list for Worlds opened months ago. So it is probably too late to sign up for the wait list and reasonably expect to make it from the wait list. However, I have heard of teams that tagged along to Worlds (maybe even a Woodbridge team) and when another team did not show up, since they had their robot with them, they were able to play.
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This is a very unofficial answer. For the official policy, you’ll need to talk to the REC.
A while ago, it was common for a handful of teams to not show up to Worlds for whatever their reason. I would get notified of team swaps on check-in day, during morning practice matches, and even after qualification matches had started and then I had to swap them in the TM databases for their division. I know they had a pool of teams to pull from that brought robots to the event, but weren’t registered; it’s my understanding that they were either local teams or teams that were part of an organization that already qualified some teams, and brought extra robots.
Much to my relief, the frequency of team swaps has greatly decreased the past couple of years and there actually may have not been any last year. I think the REC has gotten better at making sure that teams that sign up actually show up to the event.
As said before, last year the empty spots were just filled up by local Kentucky teams, and that kind of screwed up our schedule because they normally just brought other teams down.