Team Advancement

Section 7 of the 2016 FIRST Robotics Competition Administrative Manual was published last night. This section covers how Regional and District teams advance through the system. Nothing has changed from last year for Regional teams, but District teams will want to look closely at the sections related to their situation. While the rules themselves haven’t changed, we did include the number of FIRST Championship slots each District is getting, along with information on the number of awards the District management teams have chosen to present at their District Championships, for those awards of which they had options.

2017 Progress

The committee working and the geographical assignment of Teams to the two 2017 FIRST Championships, and potential Team swap options, which we blogged about here, has mostly completed its work, after weekly meetings for the last ten weeks or so. We still need to summarize our recommendations to Senior FIRST Management for their review and approval. Depending on how things progress, I expect we’ll be able to announce the final results to the community within the next three or four weeks.

I want to extend a huge thanks to the committee! As you could imagine, this was not an easy task, but they were able to pull together their sometimes disparate opinions and get it done. Thanks, everyone!

History Patches

You’ll remember we talked about Team Standards and History Patches in this blog. Now that the game is out of the bag, we can tell you a little more about the History Patches each team will be receiving at each event. Take a look:

This is an example of the ‘Week 1’ patch. Each team attending a Week 1 event (or, the Week 0.5 event, as we rounded up) will be receiving this patch. The basic design for the patches from week to week will be the same, but the color of the tower will change, as will the competition week number, indicated by the Roman numeral near the top of the tower. District Championships will be indicated by ‘DC’ near the top of the tower, and the FIRST Championship will be indicated by a simple (and simply magnificent) ‘C’. Patches are 3.4 inches wide and 2.6 inches high at their largest points. As noted before, patches are self-adhesive, to allow you to easily put them on your Team Standard.

So, why didn’t we show this before Kickoff? As you can see, the patches have the official post-Kickoff FIRST STRONGHOLD logo, with what we thought were rather obvious goal openings in the tower. As I said before, we wanted to try to keep a few secrets at least.

Frank