FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

A Reminder

Remember our 2017 and 2018 Championship Assignment Maps showing which teams are being assigned to what FIRST Championship? This is just a quick reminder that, as we said in the information update about this topic, the states of Kansas and Missouri in the US will be transitioning to FIRST Championship Houston for 2018. So, while all other geographies that were assigned to FIRST Championship St Louis will be moved to Detroit, teams from Kansas and Missouri will be joining the party in Houston.

We recognize that for some teams in these states the trip to Houston will actually be longer than the trip to Detroit. We’re sorry for this, but we did want to keep states together in their Championship assignments, and moving these two states does bring better balance between the two Championship locations with respect to geographical team counts. We also expect to have better waitlist balance between the two locations with this change.

Some Good News

For the 2017 season, you may remember we added one FIRST Championship wild card slot to every Regional event, in addition to any wild cards that normally would have been generated. Details were in this blog. Good news, we’ll be doing this again for the 2018 season!

I want to emphasize though, as we said in the original blog, this is not necessarily a permanent change. We will be making year to year decisions on this. We may or may not be doing this for the 2019 season or beyond. But we’ll be doing it for the 2018 season!

Frank