Team Leaders,

The 2020 MSHSL Robotics Tournament rules are up on the FIRST in Upper Midwest website (https://firstuppermidwest.org/off-season-events/mshsl-championship/ ).  As you might know, we work hard to keep the Tournament rules aligned with the District and FIRST Championship rules.

There are two notable changes in the rules.  As you might expect, we removed the bag requirement for robots going to the MSHSL championship.

We also addressed a new issue in the rules around Chairman’s Award invitations to the Tournament.  This part of the Tournament rules is closely patterned on the FIRST Championship invitation rules, as each Regional Chairman’s Award winner is invited both to the FIRST Championship and the Tournament.

The new issue is how to handle teams winning the Chairman’s Award at the FIRST Championship.  These teams enter the FIRST Hall of Fame, receive permanent invitations to the FIRST Championship, and are not eligible for the Regional Chairman’s Award for the next five years.  Team 1816 “The Green Machine” was the Championship Chairman’s Award winner this year in Detroit.

We ultimately decided not to issue permanent invitations to the Tournament to teams in the Hall of Fame.  Given the relatively small size of our tournament field (36 teams), we want to maintain the current balance of teams qualifying on robot performance and teams qualifying on culture awards.  At the same time, receiving the Championship Chairman’s Award is an enormous achievement that we want to recognize.  In light of that, we adopted a new rule that invites winners of the Championship Chairman’s Award to the tournament in the year following their win.  No members of Team 1816 participated in the discussion or decision on this portion of the rules changes.

We explored expanding the tournament field from 36 teams to either 39 or 42 teams, but were unable to come to a consensus with our partners at MSHSL on an expansion.  We’ll continue to explore ways to make this happen in future years.

You should also be aware of the tournament fees that MSHSL will collect starting this year.  Mark Lawrence wrote about this change back in December (https://firstuppermidwest.org/2019/12/10/mn-first-mshs-registration-fees/ ).

We’re planning to run a more in-depth look at the rules prior to the 2021 tournament.  If you’ve got ideas or feedback, or think you might want to participate in the rulemaking process in the future, email me at steve.peterson@firstuppermidwest.org.

Steve Peterson
Chairman, FIRST in Upper Midwest