2009 Minnesota Regionals

A Short History of the Minnesota FIRST Regional

By Greg B.

In case you haven’t heard, Minnesota will be hosting the first ever FIRST double regional this April! The two coinciding Regional events, one being held in Williams Arena and the other taking place in Mariucci Arena across the street, will have room for up to 120 teams! With the phenomenal growth of the program in the state over the past few years the number of teams in the state exploded leading up to the inaugural Minnesota Regional last spring. The growth in the number of teams since then has added even more teams who’d like to be able to participate in a local regional competition. Mark Lawrence, Chairman of the Regional Planning Committee, comments “With growing corporate sponsorships and supportive school administrators, we’ve been able to start a significant number of new teams again this year. It’s exciting to be hosting two regional events so that all the Minnesota teams can have a home field advantage.” Now there’ll hopefully be room for everyone!

With all this growth in Minnesota the past few years, it may come as quite a surprise that a grand total of two teams were from Minnesota prior to the 2006 Build Season. How is it that a state, virtually non-existent on the FIRST map two years ago, now has 81 FRC teams and is in the process of planning the first-ever double regional event?

Well, the truth is a number of things contributed to the rapid rise. The existing two teams, including Edina Robotics FIRST Team 1816, The Green Machine, took it as a personal challenge to aggressively spread theFIRST message. The Green Machine participated in Governor Tim Pawlenty’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Conference in 2006, worked to place stories about FIRST and the team in local print and broadcast media, and helped mentor new FRC teams in the metropolitan Twin Cities area.

At the same time, efforts to promote FIRST in Minnesota were being made by executives at two leading Minnesota corporations. Dr. Stephen N. Oesterle, Senior Vice President-Medicine and Technology of Medtronic, Inc., and Bill McConnell, Senior Vice president of Boston Scientific Corp., stepped forward and each guaranteed financial support for six new teams for the 2007 competition season, producing a total of 12 new teams.

Susan Lawrence, Regional Director of FIRST for the Midwest, spurred on further growth by helping organize events to attract corporate sponsors and, as importantly for teams, draw in mentors from technical, mechanical, engineering and programming fields. Things really kicked into high gear after a challenge was issued directly from the very pinnacle of FIRST leadership to Susan Lawrence and her tiny group of FIRST Robotics enthusiasts in Minnesota: “Dean Kamen challenged us, and in particular, Dr. Oesterle, to create enough interest in FIRST, to grow the program sufficiently, to get to the point where there could be a regional in Minnesota by 2008,” Ms. Lawrence says. “This meant there had to be at least 15 teams here in Minnesota.”

Ken Rosen was brought in as the newly named Assistant Director of FIRST in Minnesota to help get new teams going by researching and making the initial contacts with school districts. His tasks included helping develop support for FIRST Robotics among high school students, faculty, and staff, as well as reaching out to nearby corporations for the critical financial support. Mr. Rosen also worked hard to establish teams in a diverse set of schools to ensure that FIRST Robotics in Minnesota was an equal opportunity for students and schools across the socio-economic spectrum: “We wanted to make it fully-reflective of Minnesota and as inclusive as possible -- so that the state's diversity could be fully-captured by the spectrum of teams,” Mr. Rosen says.

Thanks to the efforts of all those involved in Minnesota, the goal of having a minimum of 15 teams was reached in fall, 2006. This ensured that the first-ever FIRST Kickoff event, a time the year’s game challenge is issued and teams receive their kit of parts, would be held in Minnesota in January 2007. At that Minnesota kickoff event, 14 new rookie teams joined the two veteran FRC teams at the University of Minnesota’s Coffman Union for the satellite broadcast direct from Manchester, N.H.

Since the milestone of 15 teams occurred right at the beginning of the 2007 build season, too much work still had to be done to make Minnesota “regional ready” so all the teams traveled out of state for competitions. However, the goal was set to have regional competitions begin here in March 2008. To help get the FIRSTBoard to approve the Minnesota Regional, Dr. Oesterle and Mr. McConnell in late spring 2007 vouched that they would be able to locate sufficient funding for the regional event and additional teams. Backed by the credibility of helping to found 14 new teams in the sate, the FIRST board approved the plan to host a regional here -- and then the actual planning began. Even more rapid expansion of the program occurred between then and the 2008 Build Season bringing the state teams total to 54.

First on the list was winning substantial financing backing and support from local Minnesota companies. Here again, Dr. Oesterle stepped forward and rose to the challenge. Dr. Oesterle tapped into a network of other corporations and organizations and worked hard to convince them to support FIRST. The major corporations and organizations funding the 2008 Minnesota FIRST Regional were Medtronic, Boston Scientific, the University of Minnesota, and 3M. The University of Minnesota’s support for FIRST includes its Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute of Technology. The site for the regional was identified as Williams Arena, located on the campus of the University of Minnesota.

Further support for the regional event, as well as funding for individual teams, came from NASA, Lockheed Martin, Cargill, General Mills, Best Buy, EV3, Banner Engineering, Nonin Medical, Caterpillar, Pentair, Graco, Thomas, McNemery & Partners, GE Fleet Services, Flint Hills Resources, BAE Systems, Minnesota Wire & Cable, St. Jude Medical, and Polaris Industries.

Thanks to all the hard work on the part of all involved, the inaugural Minnesota Regional was a huge success! However, given that some local teams couldn’t attend the 2008 event because it was so full and there now being 78 teams registered in the state, it was clear that one 2009 Minnesota Regional wouldn’t be enough. That is why organizers are now planning to host the first ever double regional. Again, the two Regional events will coincide with The 10,000 Lakes Regional being held in Williams Arena and the North Star Regional taking place in Mariucci Arena across the street. There is room for up to 120 teams to attend and we hope to see your team there!