Event Policies

The decision to cancel an event is taken very seriously. We may need to cancel, postpone, or shorten events for several reasons, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Severe Weather Conditions (such as ice, snow, severe thunderstorms, flooding, etc.)
• Exceptional structural circumstances to the facility (including power outages, loss of heat, loss of water, fire, or damage from a natural disaster)
• Significant illness which may involve the closing of a facility prior to the event or an illness arising at an event (including a severe or contagious illness which may have had caused the facility to be closed the previous day, or a severe illness which requires extraordinary action by medical personnel.)
• Significant number of teams having to cancel due to a contagious illness within the team.

The FIRST^® Tech Challenge Utah Board and the Event Director will determine if there will be a delay, early dismissal, or cancellation of the tournament or if the tournament will be held in an alternative form. There also may be situations where the local venue manager (such as a school's Principal) and/or relevant government agency cancels an event at their location.

When a waitlist is needed due to high demand for a qualifier, we will make every effort to ensure that teams who want to play are able to. However, we must also balance that with allowing teams a chance to qualify if they haven't already.

At the time a qualifier fills capacity, the FIRST^® Tech Challenge Utah Board will take the following actions, moving to the next step only when the one before fails:

1. Check with the qualifier host to see if the total capacity can be increased.
2. Ask teams who are already registered to voluntarily drop from the qualifier (via mass-email to all teams currently registered). Any team that volunteers will be placed on a list as volunteers, but will not be dropped until it becomes necessary, at which point a full refund will be issued (similar to how over-sold flights work). Any team that volunteers to drop due to a waitlist will be given preference for future qualifiers during the current season.

3. Once the volunteer list has been exhausted, teams will be involuntarily dropped as needed, in the following order.

   1. Teams who have exceeded the number of qualifiers allowed for advancement (if applicable)
   2. Teams who have already qualified, in descending order by number of qualifiers attended.

Steps 2-3 will only be taken if there are teams on the waitlist who have not yet qualified.

Waitlist clearing will happen in the following order:

1. Teams who have not yet qualified (first-come, first-served).
2. Any remaining waitlisted team (first-come, first-served). If you have already qualified for the next level of play, do not expect to clear the waitlist.