Advancement to the 2025 FIRST Championship
December 16, 2024
FIRST® Championship and FIRST® Tech Challenge Premier Event Capacity
In 2026 for the DECODE™ presented by RTX season, we will be welcoming 336 teams to the FIRST Championship, up (31%) from 256 teams last season.
As part of this growth, we are also continuing to improve how teams advance. Last year, we piloted the addition of Premier Events to help create more opportunities. This increased the number of advancing teams from 2.8% to 7.2% of teams. While we are planning to follow up with details and statistics, the surveys overwhelmingly show that teams said they enjoyed these Premier Events and want more of these opportunities.
In 2025-26 for DECODE we will continue offering these events and scaling up the advancement opportunities. Our intent is to create advancement opportunities for 8-8.5% of teams. This means more teams will have the chance to celebrate their season and all their hard work on a global stage.
In addition to continuing to expand advancement opportunities we are excited to roll out a new advancement system for the FIRST® Tech Challenge.
Our Evolving Advancement Model
We previously mentioned that we are collecting feedback and working with volunteers, coaches, and partners to look at how advancement can be improved. Over the summer, a dedicated multi-disciplinary group focused specifically on this topic, and now we are excited to share the results.
The new advancement system is designed to reward well-rounded teams with an approach that combines robot performance and awards. Instead of advancing on specific achievements, teams now earn points throughout the event.
Below we will highlight many of the changes, and some of the reasoning behind this change. We encourage those interested in the details to dig in with a supporting white paper which showcases more of the model and process.
Of course, read the official DECODE Competition Manual for the final details. The preview release will be available in early August.
Advancement: Background and Goals
Our working group brought together voices from all parts of the FIRST Tech Challenge community, and included Program Delivery Partners, FIRST Staff, coaches, alumni, developers, and others across a wide range of regions and roles. We also worked with members of the FIRST® Robotics Competition Advancement Task Force who were excited to share the lessons they learned during their own implementation.
This group looked closely at the current system, where advancement typically followed a set order: judged awards, then robot performance, then back to judged awards, and so on. While this made things predictable, it sometimes forced teams to focus narrowly on one goal, like trying to win a specific award or focusing only on their robot performance. This was even more common in situations when only a few spots were available to advance.
But FIRST Tech Challenge is about more than one specific moment or achievement. Teams succeed in many different ways; on the field, in judging, in how they work together and represent their values. We want an advancement system that reflects everything teams bring to an event, rewards teams who are growing in multiple areas of the program, and helps make the experience more positive, inclusive, and motivating.
Advancement: What's Changing
Under the new advancement system, teams will accrue advancement points throughout an event. At the end of the event, the top N teams according to advancement points will advance. Advancement points are gained over the course of a single event, so teams are only being compared with other teams at their event when considering advancement. This system will be used at all events for the 2025-2026 season - Qualifying Tournaments, League Tournaments, Super Qualifying Tournaments, and Regional Championships.
There are four ways teams earn advancement points at an event:
- Qualification Round Performance: Teams will earn points based on their qualification ranking.
- Alliance Captains and Draft Order Acceptance: Teams will earn points based on the playoff alliance they are a part of, either as the captain or an alliance partner. Alliance captains and their partners receive the same number of points.
- Playoff Advancement: Teams will earn points based on how far their team progresses in the double-elimination bracket.
- Team Judged Awards: Teams will earn points based on awards they receive from the judges.
Note: These points will be calculated and totaled automatically by the FIRST Tech Challenge Event Management System and will be visible/accessible online for teams to view.
For those familiar with FIRST Robotics Competition and their advancement models, these categories will look familiar. While we used the FIRST Robotics Competition model as an inspiration, this new structure is tailored for FIRST Tech Challenge and the systems within the program.
Advancement: The Points Summary
Qualification Round Performance: (16 points max, 2 points min - regardless of event size) At the end of qualification matches, the top ranked team will receive 16 points. The lowest ranked team receives a minimum of 2 points. All other teams fall on a distribution within that range based on their rank.
Alliance Captains and Draft Order Acceptance: (20 points max) The next two categories are very similar, and both related to the alliance selection process. These points are awarded at the END of alliance selection. Teams may earn advancement points for being an alliance captain, or for being drafted and accepting an invitation to join an alliance - they cannot receive points for both.
Note: The alliance captain and drafted team for each alliance receive the same number of points.
Advancement points for both of these categories are calculated by subtracting the alliance number from 21. For example, a team on the number 1 alliance will earn 20 points (21 - 1 = 20), while a team on the 6th alliance will earn 15 points (21 - 6 = 15).
Alliance Captains: Teams earn advancement points based on the alliance number they captain (i.e. alliance 1, alliance 2, etc.).
Draft Order Acceptance: Similarly to the points awarded to Alliance Captains, teams earn advancement points based on the alliance number they accepted an invitation to join.
Playoff Advancement: (40, 20, 10, 5, or 0 points) The further into the playoffs an alliance progresses, the more points the teams on that alliance receive. All teams on an alliance receive the same number of playoff advancement points.
1st Place (Winner): 40 points
2nd Place (Finalist): 20 points
3rd Place: 10 points
4th Place: 5 points
5th and below: 0 points
Team Judged Awards: (60 max points) Teams earn advancement points when they receive recognition from the Judges. As the top award in FIRST Tech Challenge, the Inspire Award is given more points. However, all other awards receive the same number of points (including the Judges’ Choice Award).
Inspire Award:
Inspire 1: 60 points
Inspire 2: 30 points
Inspire 3: 15 points
All other awards:
1st Place: 12 points
2nd Place: 6 points
3rd Place: 3 points
LEARN MORE: For a detailed look at the reasoning behind each category and the math which makes it work, please refer to the separate “FIRST Tech Challenge 2025-2026 Advancement Model Details” PDF. This document also showcases some simulations highlighting the impact we expect from these changes.
Advancement: Predicted Impact
How can we gauge the effect of using advancement points for FIRST Championship and FIRST Tech Challenge Premier Events?
When developing and tuning this model we looked at how the new advancement points model would have impacted advancement to the 2025 FIRST Championship. While this is not a perfect representation, it serves as a good way to check our model against our desired outcomes.
After expanding our evaluation to a 336-team FIRST Championship, and comparing the list of teams who would have advanced based on the new advancement points model with the list of teams who attended the 2025 FIRST Championship, we observed the following:
- ~10% of Winning Alliance Captains and Inspire Award Winners (teams guaranteed advancement under the previous system) would not have advanced to the FIRST Championship based on the new points model.
- After investigating the events where this occurred, it is due to a combination of an event having relatively few advancement slots (most commonly two) and teams who did very well in either robot performance or team judged awards, but not well in the other category.
- Advancement for Winning Alliance Picks increases from 67% to 72%.
- Advancement for Finalist Alliance members increases from 18% to 40%.
- Advancement for 1st Place Team Judged Awards (excluding the Inspire Award). increases from 11% to 19%
Because advancement from Regional Championships not only includes the FIRST Championship but also FIRST Tech Challenge Premier Events, we looked at the effect of a much larger advancement pool. Looking at a larger model for both FIRST Championship and FIRST Premier Events yielded the following results.
- 100% of Winning Alliances and Inspire Award Winners advance.
- 91% of Finalist Alliances advance.
- 90% of Inspire Award 2nd Place Recipients advance.
- 65% of Inspire Award 3rd Place Recipients advance.
- 46% of teams who won any 1st Place Team Judged Award (excluding the Inspire Award) advance.
We did not stop at the overall statistics. If you review the separate “FIRST Tech Challenge 2025-2026 Advancement Model Details” PDF, you can see two of the many events (anonymized) we analyzed to understand the “real” impact of the new model on familiar regions and teams.
These final results gave us confidence that the system we developed rewarded the well-rounded teams we aimed to recognize and also scaled well over a wide variety of advancement totals, covering potential FIRST Championship growth in the future as well as FIRST Tech Challenge Premier Events.
Looking Forward - Potential Future Changes
While we believe these changes are an improvement from the previous model, there are still other areas that may be able to be improved for future years. We will continue to evaluate future changes and announce if we decide to implement anything additional for future seasons.