FIRST Championship Updates and Introducing Premier Events

FIRST Championship Updates

We’re excited to announce that the FIRST Championship is expanding again this year! We will be inviting 256 FIRST Tech Challenge teams from more than 95 regions to play 2024-2025 INTO THE DEEP presented by RTX at the FIRST Championship presented by BAE Systems this year!

There will be no significant changes to the way FIRST Championship allocations are calculated this year. The same as last year, all regions which have the minimum number of teams registered will receive two invitations to the FIRST Championship. New regions who are in one of their pilot seasons may have a single invitation for FIRST Championship.

Additional allocations for regions in the US, Mexico or Canada are based on the number of registered teams in each region as of December 2, 2024. For regions outside of North America allocations are based on the December 2 registration number or the prior year team total, whichever is greater. (Teams, if you haven’t paid for your FIRST registration, do it now to help your region’s representation at the FIRST Championship!)

We expect to publish most of the allocation numbers for this season during the week of December 9, 2024.

Allocations which are returned to the pool by regions which do not use their invites are prioritized back to that global region.

And now…

Introducing Premier Events

While we are excited to announce expanding the FIRST Championship again this year, FIRST Tech Challenge teams deserve many more opportunities to advance to events like the FIRST Championship.

Starting this season, we are introducing a new event type, Premier Events. These events are a parallel capstone experience to the FIRST Championship and teams will earn advancement to these events from performance at their Regional Championship.

For those of you who may have been involved in FIRST Tech Challenge for a while you might remember the Super Regional events hosted from 2014 - 2018. The number one thing we heard from teams and volunteers about these events was how much they enjoyed being at a fun, amazing event focused specifically on FIRST Tech Challenge. However, there were also drawbacks to this model including:

• Many teams who advanced to the FIRST Championship struggled with the extra required cost and travel expense in addition to the cost of travel to the Super Regional which negatively impacts having a rich and varied regional representation at the FIRST
• Super Regionals did not serve teams outside of the continental United States.
• More layers of advancement events compress the qualification schedule to a shorter time period.
• Not unique to the Super Regional model but, FIRST Tech Challenge is a diverse and global community and the annual April schedule for the FIRST Championship doesn’t work for all our teams.

In January we formed a working group of over 25 Program Delivery Partners representing a wide variety of backgrounds: international/domestic regions, large/small regions, former Super Regional hosts, and newer partners. We asked them what a possible return to a Super Regional model would look like and how would we address the drawbacks to that system with the knowledge we have today.

Ultimately, the conclusion was that returning to a Super Regional model of play was not going to serve all FIRST Tech Challenge teams the way we wanted it to. This led us to choose to move to the parallel capstone event model much like the Open Invitational event pathway in FIRST LEGO League.

Thank you to everyone who has put their time and energy into this process either directly through the working group or by participating in the many other discussions we had on the topic!

Premier Events aim to bring back more high-end events focused specifically on FIRST Tech Challenge, without restricting our global community to a single Championship experience and without adding an additional gateway to advancement. Premier Events will be recognized as official event plays and winners will be highlighted at the FIRST Championship the following year.

We plan to offer only a limited number of Premier Event slots this year, which may be regionally restricted depending on which events apply and are approved, however the goal of the next few seasons is to build a large Premier Event capacity spread across many global regions. FIRST Tech Challenge regions would continue to be granted FIRST Championship allocations, as well as Premier Event allocations. Teams will be able to choose between accepting a FIRST Championship invitation or attending any Premier Event worldwide with open capacity.

As an example, this is how advancement from an individual FIRST Tech Challenge region might look in the next few seasons with the exact number of slots still based on region size.

For this pilot year, we intentionally left the event requirements vague. The most important question that applicants need to answer is: how is your event going to create a fun, exciting, and memorable culminating experience for the teams who attend?

We imagine this is going to be achieved in a number of different ways from high end production, being hosted in memorable locations, team activities outside of the venue or creative adaptations to the game or tournament structure. We do expect the requirements to evolve over the next few seasons based on the experiences of our event hosts and teams who attend these events.

If you think you have a great idea for a Premier Event, please work directly with your local Program Delivery Partner and complete a Premier Event application.