Regional Advancement Task Force Update

Over the past few months, we created task forces to look at a variety of topics. This blog post is focused on Regional Advancement. This group was made up of FIRST^® Staff, Program Delivery Partners, and Community Members (team mentors and event volunteers).

In looking at the current Regional Advancement model, the group was tasked with some guidelines that the new proposal had to work with. Those guidelines included:

• Take all stakeholders into account
• Align with FIRST Core Values
• Preserve the concept of pre-qualified teams but open to changes on who qualifies
• Maintain a balance for robot performance and awards
• Maintain proportional split between regionals and districts
• Scalable based on the number of teams at FIRST Championship
• No additional qualification layers
• Qualify teams throughout the season, not all in Week 6
• No remote judging
• All teams who qualify get to compete with their robot
• No change to alliance structure or playoff format
• FIRST Impact Award (FIA) should basically be guaranteed qualification
• Engineering Inspiration (EI) should be strongly correlated to qualification

The group also assessed some additional goals on what we wanted to achieve with a change:

• Align team incentives with a set of broad and robust measures of performance, instead of specific all-or-nothing outcomes
• Winning Alliance Captains should basically be guaranteed qualification
• Winning 1st pick should basically be guaranteed qualification
• Minimize the amount of luck involved in qualification
• Lower the incentives to be the 24th robot, raise incentives to be the 3rd-6th robot
• Equitable qualifying for team both early and late events
• The system should be intuitive and relatively easy to understand

With all that in mind, the group developed a Regional Advancement model where teams earn points at their first two events for robot and award performance (similar to the District Advancement model). At the end of each Regional event, the 3 teams with the highest number of points earned at that event earn an invitation to FIRST Championship. All teams who don’t earn a slot at an event are then ranked in order in the Regional Pool. Additional teams are invited off the Regional Pool at set intervals throughout the season.

Check out the Regional Advancement Changes Overview for full details about the proposed changes.

Due to resource constraints and to mitigate risks associated with a large change like this, we are planning a phased implementation in the 2025 season before full implementation for the 2026 season.

We will be working with some volunteers over the next few months to fully design and test the Regional Advancement points model. If development progresses as we expect, we will be implementing the following for the 2025 season:

• Maintain automatic qualification for:
  • Regional Winner Captain
  • Regional Winner 1st Pick
  • FIRST Impact Award winner
  • Engineering Inspiration Award winner
• Remove Wild Card (i.e. Only those 4 teams from any given event would automatically qualify. There’s no attempt to “backfill” an event’s slots to ensure that 4 unique teams from each event qualify.)
  • Without Wild Cards it is possible for no new teams at an event to directly qualify for the FIRST Championship. This likely would have happened at one event in 2024 - the Midwest Regional which had 11 teams already qualified. Two teams at that event would have subsequently qualified via the Regional Pool.
• Remove the Priority Waitlist
• Remove the Open Waitlist
• Implement proposed Regional Advancement Points Model (as described in the above linked document) to replace Wild Card, Priority Waitlist, and Open Waitlist

We will share an update later this year once we have confirmed that we can implement this phased approach. We plan to have a webpage created that shows rankings of all Regional teams (similar to the District pages). During the competition season, we ask that teams do not contact FIRST to ask if they will be offered a slot from the Regional Pool. Instead, please wait for FIRST to contact the team.

Finally, we want to give a huge thank you to our group, who were mostly volunteers. We also want to preemptively thank the volunteers who have agreed to help us with implementing this new model.