Why is NorCal FLL’s tournament registration process complicated…

The most common questions we received this week is why do we do a 2 step process for tournament registration and why is this so “complicated”.

First, I will address why we have a 2 step process (pre-reqs AND then registration) :

Each season, we have a variable number between 5% and 15% of teams that decide for one reason or another that they are NOT going to compete.  This means that we may or may not need  up to 4 qualifiers.      If we didn’t know in advance, we would spend a lot of energy, time and effort in creating new qualifiers that just weren’t needed.

The worst part of this is to convince someone to host and organize a qualifier AND then after they get all of the site permissions, worked through insurance and the facility use agreement, and recruit a planning committee and start to get key volunteers lined up,  we have to inform them that we don’t need them after all  – they won’t offer again, so we lose out for the future as well!

The next worst thing with this is then having to work with each of the affected teams that wanted to go to those qualifiers and figure out how to “consolidate”  half-full qualifier tournaments so that the 12 team minimum number of teams is met.   This is alot of work to clean up and work through and makes the coaches (and the parents of the team members) crazy as they “thought” that they were in a tournament that they wanted to go to but then come to find out, that they need to pick a different location/date that may or may not work for them.  Ugh!

By getting commitment early that a team is going to register (by asking for payment and some team information), we avoid these problems.  We are able to better “right-size” the number of size of qualifiers to match the number of teams interested in competing  as best as we can.

Next up – is why is this so complicated – with jotform and some people requiring paper consent forms and having to uploading a roster?

Part of the complication is from FIRST HQ.  Both the TIMS and “STIMS” (now named Youth Team Member System) are under continual improvements to manage the 4 FIRST programs that span small JrFLL Kindergarten members up to very large (over 100 members) FRC high school (some that are 18 years old and considered legal adults) teams.   The systems were originally designed and used just by FRC  but needed significant changes to manage FTC, FLL and JrFLL teams.   So the documentation,  instructions and even knowledge of how the systems work and/or what are the common issues is ever changing…

The next part of the complication is that FIRST does not give us access to any of the team information beyond name, number, city, and coach/asst coach information.   For example, we do not have direct access to any of the team demographic information or the team roster.   We struggle to get grants and sponsors due to not having accurate information about who are serving.   So we have to ask for this information separately.

Finally, FIRST has a couple of “issues” with the team roster that have to be worked around.

1. FLL is designed for students 9 years old up to 14 years old.   A coach can not invite or add a student member on to the roster (via the system) that is “too young”  – the system will only allow that student to join a JrFLL team.   However, FIRST‘s materials suggest that this decision is up to the coach to make the determination for their team…. so since the 8 year old team member can not be “officially” listed on the roster, if the coach accepts them on the team, the team member has to be hand written in and a paper version of the team member form needs to get sent.
2. FLL encourages high school students (particularly FRC and FTC team members) to mentor FLL teams – but again since these are minors, they need a parent’s consent.  The only process for a parent consent is to join a specific team…. so even with a youth mentor listed on their own FTC or FRC team roster, this will not get “carried” over to allow the FLL coach to add them to their roster. So, to work around this,  the coach has to hand write the youth mentor onto the roster and have a paper version of the consent form that is signed by the mentor’s parent or guardian.
3. Another issue is that the electronic consent is in English only but the paper consent form is translated in Spanish.  So parents that are not comfortable reading/signing a legal document that they can not understand (I would be in this camp if I had to sign a legal document in a different language) only have the option of doing the paper consent form.    So the coach will have to hand write in the team member name’s and get the paper version of the team member form filled out AND a copy of the Spanish version of the consent form.
4. In addition, the parent’s consent requires them to have an email address.  Not everyone has an email address.  So a parent either has to create a new one (possible but takes time), or do the paper version.
5. And then, any adult coach or mentor that just doesn’t want to do the electronic consent, must fill out the consent form in paper version.

 

We might ask why we don’t just use the FIRST TIMS event registration system.   Basically we would have to individually accept each team into an event – with ~500+ teams that is alot of effort to manage individually AND still suffers from not knowing ahead of time how many qualifiers to have (and having to delete tournaments and move teams,etc).

 

Finally,  I have worked hard to add instructions and make the jotform (our form) as simple to use as possible. I  am open to additional feedback – but please don’t just tell me it is confusing or hard.  I need to know specifically what you didn’t understand so that I know WHAT to improve and/or change.